"As long as the couch is there, there's going to be a need for couch co-op": Split Fiction studio COO on standing out "in a year when every third week, the greatest thing comes out"

When my wife and I played through Split Fiction back in March near release, I remember thinking, 'how is anything this year going to top this? It's my Game of the Year, for sure, wrap it up now.' But then Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came out and was almost instantly deified in RPGdom, Donkey Kong Bananza launched and redefined the modern platformer, and then I finally got around to playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and realized it might be the ultimate immersive medieval RPG everyone had been saying it was.

There's a jarring dichotomy between the fact that we're living through one of the most turbulent periods of video game history, marked in large part by a corrective post-Covid downsizing and corporate greed, and the realization that we're increasingly inundated with fantastic games. It often feels like the industry's burning down around me, and yet, here we are, juggling handfuls of GOTY contenders seemingly born from the ashes. It's that very paradox that spins at the center of my conversation with Hazelight Studios COO Oskar Wolontis, who reflects on the decisive critical and commercial success of Split Fiction in 2025, and in contrast, the struggle to stand out in such an extraordinarily competitive year.

Split Decision

Wolontis tells me the team at Hazelight was "really, really happy," "blown away," and even "shocked" by the reception to Split Fiction, even though they had always known it was a "really good game." While everyone had confidence on that front, they were also well aware of the game's proximity to big hitters like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds, which both launched the previous month to similarly enticing reviews. And although Wolontis says Split Fiction very much held its own with peak player numbers higher "than we ever saw with It Takes Two," 2021's Game of the Year, there's no denying the pitfalls of today's uber-competitive landscape.

"It's hard to break through in a year when every third week, the greatest thing comes out," Wolontis tells me. "It kind of is what it is. So, for us, it's been more trying to make sure that at least the people that are interested in what we do, that we try and reach them as much as we can … it's been a busy year, so it's more, we're happy to be remembered in the context of this year, when historians look back at everything (laughs), because it's been so jam-packed."

Compounding this issue of longevity is Hazelight's fairly unique approach to post-launch support. It's pretty much standard for big games across the genre spectrum to keep players busy with content updates, if not full-blown expansions, at least through launch year. At Hazelight, everyone pretty much just moves on immediately aside from performance and bug fixes. That means it's up to players whether they want to move on to other games as well.

"The way we operate at Hazelight, our games are done when we release them and we don't do DLCs or any kind of post-launch content or anything like that," he says. "So, by the time Split Fiction had launched, the team was already, for two months, everyone, all hands on deck on our new project. And that's been the case for an entire year; we're all doing the next big thing."

The couch's the limit

That next big thing has yet to be revealed, but Wolontis assures me the studio isn't about to stray from the formula it's been following since 2018's A Way Out: co-op-only games with big hearts. With three beloved releases under its belt, Hazelight has long since solidified itself as the local co-op standard-bearer in 2025, but that was never a guarantee. In fact, Wolontis tells me there was a lot of doubt from, well, pretty much everyone the moment Hazelight decided to make its debut game an exclusively co-op adventure.

"There were guesses from ourselves and from our publisher and from everyone, like, 'What is the cap here? Like, how many people in the world would want to pay for a game that you can't even start playing yourself, apart from a few people on YouTube and Twitch that are crazy and playing with two controllers,'" he says.

"And what we're seeing is that we're raising that ceiling every week," he continues. "Was it 1,000,000 players? Was it 2,000,000 players? Was it 10,000,000? And now, combining all of our games – and also the fact that we're kind of estimating that for every game we sell, there's probably two people playing it – I mean, the numbers are so high now. I mean, we broke through 20,000,000, 30,000,000, you know, how big is this? This audience for split-screen, co-op only games, it turns out, is really, really big, and it just keeps growing."

That last part is key: and it just keeps growing. I'd like to think Wolontis is withholding raw data backing up that claim. As someone who feels hopelessly limited in local multiplayer options, I desperately want him to be right that there's so much demand that developers can't help but pivot away from roguelikes and card battlers into splitscreen co-op, but his reasoning is anecdotal.

"We get hounded all the way from release from one of our games until we release the next one," he says, "like, 'when's there gonna be more? We just keep replaying what you have made. We want new stuff.' So honestly, I think the need for just coming together with someone on your couch is always going to be there."

Couch co-op is one of those luxuries of life that feels like it's not long for this world, even if there's little evidence to say that. In an era of gaming which is trending toward, if not dominated by, online-only multiplayer games, the idea of sitting next to a friend on a sofa and playing something on the same screen seems delightfully antiquated. And yet, Wolontis makes a very strong argument to the contrary: Is the sofa itself antiquated? He thinks not.

"I don't think personal connection is going to go away," he concludes. "We still watch TV shows with our significant other and our family at home. So, as long as the couch is there, there's going to be a need for couch co-op gaming. If the couch goes away, then I don't know about that future."

There's only one game that beat Split Fiction on our list of the best co-op games of all time.