Empulse is a fast-paced 6v6 movement shooter from 1047 Games, the studio behind Splitgate, the free-to-play shooter with 20M+ downloads. Empulse is the studio's first new IP and first premium title, and it entered Early Access on Steam on 24 June 2026.
The go-to-market ran on a deliberately short window: roughly two months from announcement to launch, built around major beats including the reveal, PC Gaming Show, Steam Next Fest, and Early Access. 1047 Games and Immutable ran the audience side of that campaign together on the Immutable Audience platform: playempulse.com as the live game site, progressive onboarding into email, Steam wishlist, and Discord, and an owned audience data layer behind every beat. The results below measure that audience programme across the launch window.
The problem
A wishlist is interest you cannot talk to. Steam tells a studio how many people wishlisted, not who they are, and it offers almost no way to reach them between announcement and launch.
- Steam wishlists are anonymous. Studios see counts and country splits, not contactable people, so the audience a big reveal builds cannot be reached directly again.
- A two-month announcement-to-launch window leaves no room for intent to decay. Every beat, from PC Gaming Show to Next Fest to Early Access, has to re-activate the same audience within days.
- Launch outcomes concentrate into the first hours. Charts and review scores are set by whoever shows up first, and a studio with no owned channel cannot influence who that is.
Using Immutable Audience, 1047 Games attacked the problem in three ways. Each step compounded: the funnel built the audience, the sends kept it warm, and the activations pointed it at the moments that decide a Steam launch.
Launch Site + Building an Owned Audience
Product used: Conversion Funnel
Launched playempulse.com on Immutable Audience as the live game site, with a progressive onboarding flow that collected email sign-ups first, then Steam wishlist, then Discord, turning anonymous reveal traffic into an owned audience 1047 Games could reach again.
Context
Empulse's reveal and trailer beats drove large traffic spikes, but a spike that lands on a bare Steam link converts once, anonymously, and is gone. With a first premium title on a two-month runway, 1047 Games needed every visit to leave something contactable behind.
The premium model raised the stakes further. With no free-to-play funnel to catch latecomers, wishlist quality and wishlist-to-purchase conversion at launch were the metrics the whole campaign had to move.
Solution
playempulse.com was built and launched on Immutable Audience as the game's live site. Instead of a single wishlist button, visitors moved through a progressive onboarding flow:
- The visitor lands on the game site from a trailer, social post, or event beat.
- They sign up with email in one click, the lowest-friction first step.
- They are prompted to wishlist Empulse on Steam, now as an identified fan rather than an anonymous click.
- They join the Discord to go deeper, linking a second contactable channel.
The ordering matters. Email first earns a contact before the visitor bounces out to Steam; the wishlist prompt then converts that intent where launch visibility is decided; Discord deepens the relationship for the fans who want more.
Every sign-up was owned, contactable, and attributed back to its source, so 1047 Games could see which beats and channels were filling the funnel rather than just driving raw traffic.
Result
41% of all site visitors signed up with an email address, each one a contactable fan rather than an anonymous click.
By launch the programme had built an owned, contactable audience feeding into the 300K+ wishlists Empulse accumulated in under two months, a total visible on public Steam trackers.
Owned-Channel Engagement
Product used: Engage
Ran the entire beat calendar through the owned channel: eight email sends from reveal to Early Access.
Context
A two-month campaign gives intent no time to decay gracefully. Each beat, from the trailer to PC Gaming Show to Next Fest to launch, needed the audience to show up within hours, not days.
Steam notifies wishlists once, at release, with no segmentation and no pre-launch beats. The rest of the calendar is the studio's problem, and without an owned channel there is nothing to run it on.
Solution
Using Engage, 1047 Games ran eight sends across the campaign, each tied to a beat. Open and click rates held up across the whole sequence:
The standout is the Private Playtest invite, a targeted send to a segmented, high-intent slice of the audience: 67.7% open and a 43.1% click rate, over 20x the Games-category median click rate of 2.11% (MailerLite, across 3.6M campaigns). Roughly 64% of recorded openers clicked. Exclusive invites to identified fans massively out-performed every broadcast send, which is the core argument for owning the audience: you know who your most engaged players are, and you can treat them differently.
| Send | Open rate | Click rate |
|---|---|---|
| Private Playtest invite | 67.7% | 43.1% |
| Email Beat 1 | 41.8% | 2.3% |
| PC Gaming Show | 38.9% | 4.1% |
| Reveal Email | 38.4% | 4.4% |
| Email Beat 2 | 37.8% | 1.9% |
| Follow-up Email | 35.8% | 1.8% |
| Email Beat 3 | 31.8% | 2.0% |
| Launch Email | 29.4% | 1.9% |
Private Playtest invite
- Open rate
- 67.7%
- Click rate
- 43.1%
Email Beat 1
- Open rate
- 41.8%
- Click rate
- 2.3%
PC Gaming Show
- Open rate
- 38.9%
- Click rate
- 4.1%
Reveal Email
- Open rate
- 38.4%
- Click rate
- 4.4%
Email Beat 2
- Open rate
- 37.8%
- Click rate
- 1.9%
Follow-up Email
- Open rate
- 35.8%
- Click rate
- 1.8%
Email Beat 3
- Open rate
- 31.8%
- Click rate
- 2.0%
Launch Email
- Open rate
- 29.4%
- Click rate
- 1.9%
Result
Click rate is the number to trust here: Apple Mail privacy features inflate open rates, so industry benchmarks now treat clicks as the reliable engagement signal. On clicks, every one of the seven standard sends beat Klaviyo's 1.69% average campaign click rate, holding between 1.8% and 4.4% across the whole calendar.
The two flagship announcements went further. The PC Gaming Show email hit a 4.1% click rate and the top reveal email 4.4%, both clear of the 3.38% mark that defines the top 10% of campaigns in Klaviyo's benchmarks, 21% and 30% above the top-decile line respectively.
Open rates were solid rather than the story, from 29.4% on the launch email to 67.7% on the playtest invite. The click-through is the proof that mattered: this audience was active and commercially useful, not just a large contact list.
Next Fest + Early Access Activation
Product used: Audience
Pointed the owned audience at the two moments that decide a Steam launch: Next Fest, where Empulse reached #1 on Popular Upcoming, and Early Access, where owned fans purchased at 2.2x the rate of non-owned wishlists and reviewed the game 17 points higher.
Context
Next Fest rankings and launch-week review scores are compounding loops. Games that start strong get shown to more players, which keeps them strong, and both loops are seeded by whoever shows up in the first hours.
That is exactly what an owned audience is for. 1047 Games did not have to hope the algorithm would surface Empulse; it could send its most engaged fans to the demo and the launch directly.
Solution
The Next Fest and launch emails, coordinated with Discord activity, concentrated the owned audience into each window while the broader wishlist pool discovered the game through Steam's own surfaces:
Result
Empulse reached #1 on Steam's Popular Upcoming chart and was a top 5 most-played demo of Steam Next Fest.
At Early Access, owned fans converted from wishlist to purchase at 14.0% vs 6.4% for non-owned wishlists, a 2.2x lift over the players the studio could not reach directly.
Owned fans also championed the game publicly: 84% of their Steam reviews were positive vs 67% from non-owned players, and they wrote 10-15% of all reviews, helping drive 400+ reviews in the first 48 hours.
The bottom line
Every game gets one launch window. Empulse's two-month sprint shows what changes when that window runs on an owned audience: the same reveal traffic became contactable fans, the same beats landed on people who actually saw them, and the same wishlist pool converted at more than twice the rate wherever 1047 Games could reach players directly.
The audience metrics moved together. 41% of site visitors signed up, open rates that never dropped below 29%, a #1 Popular Upcoming position through Next Fest, and owned fans buying at 2.2x and reviewing 17 points higher than players the studio could not reach.
And the audience persists beyond the window it was built in. The fans 1047 Games owns stay reachable for whatever the studio builds next.
Immutable Audience turns launch interest into players you can reach again.
