📉 We Counted: How Split-Screen Quietly Disappeared

Published 15 September 2026 · updated 27 September 2026 · list data as of 30 September 2026

Everyone says couch co-op is dying. Nobody says by how much. So we counted: for every five-year window since 1995 we took the games that got at least eight ratings, and checked how many of them support split-screen. The answer is sharper than the nostalgia suggests.

Two things stand out. First, the drop is not gradual — it happens between 2014 and 2015, and it happens fast: from 6.1 % to 2.9 % in one step. That is the moment online play became the default assumption and a second screen stopped being a design constraint. Second, the absolute numbers barely move. There were 109 split-screen games in 2010–2014 and 67 in 2015–2019 — but the total number of released games nearly doubled over the same period. Split-screen did not so much die as get left behind.

That reframes the problem. If you want to play together on one sofa tonight, the issue is not that nothing exists — roughly fifty well-rated split-screen games came out in the 2020s alone. The issue is that they are buried under twenty times as many games that assume everybody owns their own screen. Finding them is a filtering problem, which is exactly why we built a co-op compendium that records the player count for every one of them.

Below are the survivors: the highest-rated split-screen games released since 2020. Every one of them still puts two or more people in front of one screen.

Share of released games with split-screen

Period	With split-screen
1995–1999	9,9 % (89 / 901)
2000–2004	6,3 % (77 / 1.226)
2005–2009	6,3 % (97 / 1.551)
2010–2014	6,1 % (109 / 1.788)
2015–2019	2,9 % (67 / 2.319)
2020–2025	2,3 % (48 / 2.074)

Own analysis of the IGDB games database, September 2026. Basis: main games with a cover and at least eight ratings; split-screen taken from the structured multiplayer_modes field. Counts are a documented minimum — a missing entry means undocumented, not impossible.