STEAM? Co-op Mode Evolution
The category is not growing as a share of all games, but it is evolving!
INTRO
Who’d have thought that I’d stumble across an interesting article about STEAM? data? Again! ?? This time it’s a Game Developer article from early July titled
This article summarizes findings from a report by Video Game Insights (VGI), a supplier of industry data, called “Rise of the Co-Op Games”. The link to the PDF report is in the Game Developer article.
The VGI report combines data on Coop game counts from STEAM? together with their estimates of game sales. I don’t (currently) have any sales data, but I do have the full monty on publicly available STEAM? API data, so I thought I’d take a look.
What I found is more complicated than what VGI reports.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
TL;DR - the percentage of games with some co-op mode has been flat for 10 years. However, the games with some ONLINE co-op mode have been gaining favor while games with only OFFLINE modes have been losing favor.
Over the past ten years we see the following trends:
WHAT WE EXPLORE
This article segments STEAM? ‘game’ applications using the CATEGORY tags in the JSON data pulled from the appdetails STEAM? API. The specific tags investigated are:
These are the same tags used to filter your game library or the store offerings in the STEAM? client or website store pages.
There is no ‘Campaign’ keyword in any of the pre-defined category tags, but Co-op Campaign does appear under user defined tags — a topic not under review in this article. Co-op Campaign games include games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Abiotic Factor, and Borderlands 3.
Note that split-screen appears on its own.
GOOD SCIENCE NOTES:
THE FULL MONTY
For the impatient, here is our first graph. Yes, a very busy one on a logarithmic vertical axis so you can see everything, everywhere, all at once.
Don’t worry, we’ll use the good old Blade Runner method of “Zoom in. Enhance.” to pull out the critical details.
And if pictures and graphs are your thing, feel free to scroll ahead!
This diagram shows all combinations of application of the four tags listed above.
Here are the detailed segmentations in the graph above:
The other groupings are games with the following specific combinations of tags:
GOOD SCIENCE NOTES:
NORMALIZE TO PERCENTAGES
This is our first zoom and enhance step. We see that there were no games with these tags before 2006, so we skip earlier years. Because we are normalizing by all games, we drop those data. We also drop the non co-op games because they are not the focus.
领英推荐
But we keep a logarithmic axis so we can visually separate the data.
This graph makes it clear that STEAM? is publishing a roughly constant percentage of co-op all games every year, including so far for 2024.
We also see that MYSTERY games dropped slowly after 2012 and precipitously in 2020, so someone started enforcing some rules. ??
THE PAST 10 YEARS
2014 is when the total number of published games surpassed 1000, and those data are less noisy. Let’s zoom and enhance, again!
It’s clear that the most numerous co-op games are either purely ONLINE or purely SPLIT screen. The other significant contributions come from combinations of ONLINE with LAN and SPLIT modes — so still ONLINE, just adding another mode.
We can see this nicely by using a stacked graph.
A BETTER SEGMENTATION
Now that we can see that ONLINE combinations are cannibalizing OFFLINE co-op, let’s zoom back out to the full time line, but split the population into games in four groups that, I hope, clarify what’s going on. Those groups are:
Adding together MYSTERY, ONLINE, and OFFLINE gives us ALL CO-OP. We can get a nice visual of the evolution of co-op modes over time by using the stacked graph again. This time let’s break the ONLINE group into two subgroups - purely ONLINE, and ONLINE with additional LAN and/or SPLIT screen modes: ONLINE+.
However, since 2014 we can see that games with ONLINE co-op modes, either standalone or combined with SPLIT SCREEN and/or LAN, are steadily gaining ground.
This graph shows games with additional modes of LAN (local) and/or SPLIT screen co-op increased after 2019, and have been holding steady for the past few years.
In the early years there were a lot of MYSTERY games. It’s possible that these were actually just some form of ONLINE game, but I’m too lazy to investigate that right now because we have close to zero co-op games with undefined modes today.
OUTRO
The EXECUTIVE SUMMARY covers it all, so this section will be short. :)
As a fraction of all published STEAM? games, co-op games with some ONLINE component are increasing, but that increase looks to be at the expense of OFFLINE co-op games.
Co-op games as a percentage of all games being published is flat.
That said, the large increases in publication rate on STEAM? means we are getting more of everything.
This was fun, and also set up the next article, which will replace the term CO-OP with PVP.
METHODOLOGY
I’ll start putting this last for those that care, rather than up front, like in an academic publication. ;)
The data used for this investigation is the same data as the previous digs . To be specific, all STEAM? data presented here is for applications of type ‘game’ with a publication date between 2003-01-01 and 2024-07-31. The data were pulled from public STEAM? APIs. Games were segmented using the CATEGORY tags in that data.
CAVEAT: The game category tags investigated here are applied by, I believe, the game developers. Or at least, whoever interacts with the game’s STEAM? account. There is no easy way to verify the accuracy of the tags, but we assume that as a population they are substantially correct.
RESOURCES
?? A previous article: STEAM? Data Archaeology
?? A previous article: STEAM? Video Game Ratings and Mature Content
?? A previous article: STEAM? Offerings in 2024 Will Approach 100,000 Games
?? Video Game Insights report: Rise of the Co-op Games