With the upcoming Split Fiction, Hazelight Studios is continuing its fantastic practice of allowing co-op players to share one copy of a game, even if they’re playing together online. But this time, the developer is taking this even further, enabling players to share a single copy, even if they’re playing on different platforms. Whether you play on PC, PS5, or Xbox Series X|S, Hazelight doesn’t want you to pay for more copies of the game than you would have needed back in the golden age of couch co-op.
In doing this, Hazelight is highlighting just how much players have been screwed over by the shift to online multiplayer, and is shifting the balance back.
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Off The Couch, Online
I wasn’t paying much attention to the world of video games from September 2012 through May 2016. If those seem like awfully specific markers, it’s because it denotes the four years that I was busy getting my bachelor’s degree. When I emerged from my collegiate cocoon, I found that the multiplayer format I grew up on was basically dead.
This started happening long before that. 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare introduced the embryonic version of the XP and battle pass-driven system we know today, and I played a decent amount of the PS3 CODs. But for every hour I spent online, I spent a dozen more playing locally. Black Ops Zombies was a revelation for me and my friends, and most of the multiplayer deathmatches I played were against a friend in my basement. Online was there, but it wasn’t the primary way I interacted with those (or any) games.
When I came back to the medium, online multiplayer had fully taken over. Most games didn’t even include the option to play locally anymore, so if you wanted to have the same experience of playing against friends, you now needed as many consoles as there were players. It was such a massive downgrade that it was hard for me to believe it happened without players putting up much of a fight.
Local co-op never really went away, but the games that sustained it were made at smaller scales by smaller teams. With the Overcooked and Worms series, Team 17 has planted a flag, but the biggest games, like COD, moved on.
Couch Co-Op Champions
So, it’s been encouraging to see Hazelight take a stand for co-op — in all its many forms. These games aren’t only local co-op or only online. In a best of both worlds scenario, they let you play however you want.
That isn’t unique to Hazelight. Baldur’s Gate 3, similarly, allows you to play co-op locally or online. But what’s different is that Hazelight treats the two forms of gaming with the same logic. If you can play locally with a single-copy, why shouldn’t you be able to play online with a single copy?
It’s easy to imagine that, if decisions had been driven by what was best for players instead of money-making, this is something we would have seen a long time ago. The logistics might seem tricky, but allowing players to download a time-limited version of the game that auto-deletes from their hard drive if it isn’t used within a set amount of time seems like a fix that could have been used as early as the ’00s.
Why ever it wasn’t implemented before, I’m glad Hazelight is paving the way for a system that is even more player friendly than the couch co-op games I grew up on. It gives me hope that, if Split Fiction does well, we’ll see more studios attempt something like this.
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