📊 Who Still Makes Split-Screen Games?

Published 17 September 2026 · updated 27 September 2026 · list data as of 30 September 2026

The obvious assumption goes like this: split-screen has slipped out of big productions and now survives in small indie games nobody has heard of. We checked that against the games database — and it is wrong. The opposite is true.

First the sobering part. Of 153,385 games released since 2015 with a cover and a main-game entry, exactly 800 support split-screen. That is 0.5 percent. Split-screen is no longer a default; it is an exception.

But rarity is not the same as obscurity, and this is where the assumption breaks. Only 1.5 percent of all games released since 2015 ever collect 20 or more ratings — most releases sink without a trace. Among split-screen games it is 8.8 percent. A game with split-screen is almost six times more likely to be a game people actually noticed.

That flips the story. Split-screen did not retreat into the margins — it stopped being something you get by default and became something a studio decides to build. And deciding to build it costs money, which is why it now clusters in productions that can afford it.

Look at who makes them and three traditions appear. Traveller’s Tales leads with six notable split-screen games since 2015 — the LEGO series never stopped treating a second controller as normal. Treyarch and Infinity Ward follow with three each, because Call of Duty kept its console split-screen long after its competitors dropped it. And then there is Hazelight, also three, but for a different reason entirely: the studio does not make games that happen to have co-op, it makes nothing else. A Way Out, It Takes Two and Split Fiction cannot be played alone at all.

So the honest answer to “who still makes split-screen games” is: studios with a reason. A licence aimed at families, a series whose audience would revolt, or a design philosophy that treats the second player as the point rather than a bonus. Everywhere else the feature quietly fell out of the budget. If you want to know how that decline looked over three decades, we counted that too.

Split-screen since 2015, measured

Measure	Value
Games released since 2015 (main games with cover)	153,385
of those with split-screen	800 (0.5%)
Share of all games with ≥ 20 ratings	1.5%
Share of split-screen games with ≥ 20 ratings	8.8%
Ratio	5.9× more likely to be noticed
Traveller’s Tales (LEGO)	6 notable titles
Treyarch / Infinity Ward (Call of Duty)	3 each
Hazelight Studios	3 — and nothing else

Counted in the IGDB games database on 17 September 2026. “Notable” means at least 20 combined critic and player ratings. Main games with a cover only; adult titles excluded.