As TVs are getting bigger, more video games are losing the ability to play splitscreen games. amirite?

very true. its wild how i would do 4 player splitscreen on a square tv back in the day

by Anonymous 1 week ago

You were looking at your brother's screen, I saw you

by Superb_Football_6401 1 week ago

Well duh

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Dude I never screen peek

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Only 2 kinds of people in this world, those that grudgingly admit to peeking from time to time and liars.

by Superb_Football_6401 1 week ago

No screen peeking when they were on your team! Last big lan I had was a 4v4v4 in college. Halo 2. TV's in different rooms and wires everywhere.

by Albertobode 1 week ago

After we could finally afford another Xbox we started doing that too, but before that our group would designate who would get what. One person would have the playstation, one with the Xbox, one with the gamecube. Made it a little unfair, cus one person would always get better at the games for their system. I wrecked everyone at smash bros, but would always get stomped at halo

by Anonymous 1 week ago

let he who has not screen peeked cast the first controller

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Definitely played 4 player split screen on a 13" tube before.

by mfarrell 1 week ago

Ugh. Why are so many games lacking in regular co-op these days? Is it just to sell more copies?

by vjaskolski 1 week ago

In the 3d era, loads of "arena" games have been able to do split screen easily, whereas "open world" games haven't. Basically, if you have a wide open area and a loading screen is fine when strolling about, it probably won't have split screen. If you have a level selection, but during that level there will be no loading breaks, then there is a good chance it will have split screen. There are very, very few exceptions to this. Borderlands springs to mind; split screen that works with loading screens. I think Arena games are struggling in general. That's not the whole reason of course, the internet obviously pays a huge part, but there are fewer arena games and they are dominated by COD (which has split screen)

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Fortnite is splitscreen

by Anonymous 1 week ago

True, though it wasn't at the start. The unreal engine is the quintessential "arena" game engine, unreal tournament being possibly the biggest "arena" game back in the day. (Except maybe Halo) What wizardry Is done to make 100 person games possible is incredible

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The point is is that it CAN be done but the way the devs see it as if they don't make it splitscreen but make it coop we can force people to buy 2 of the games if they want to play with someone they live with

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Fortnite is splitscreen also

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Why do I need a 4K or 8K TV anyway when I can watch 1080P from my couch and it's not like I can see the pixels?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Nah. Hardware limitations, my ass. They just want to force people into buying multiple consoles.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Yeah exactly. We have the tech to render multiple views with less overhead. It's used extensively in VR to render each eye while having more frame rates. Everything doesn't need to be rendered twice, just what's different between the different views. It's a lot easier to just run a server and have every player send positional information instead of low level graphics rendering information.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

If the Switch can pull it off, how on earth is the PS5 struggling?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Because the PS5 isn't using Mario Kart graphics lmao

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Because Nintendo made the console, the operations system of said console, the engine of the game in question. The game in question also uses less power to run then cod. Racing games only need to look good from the track so there's a lot of things that you don't have to render cause they won't be seen saving on resources. There's a lot of little technical reasons why.

by Complex_Equipment 1 week ago

This and consoles pushing their hardware to the limit to beat gaming PCs because at their current cost you are better off by buying a PC, and the older the console gets the truer it becomes.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Very true but at the same time online multiplayer has become very popular over the past years, even on consoles where split screen was always more prominent

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Tell that to Nintendo

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I guess that's the advantage of Nintendo games not being as concerned with graphic fidelity. It is easier for them to render multiple views of the game at the same time.

by Western_Jelly_8561 1 week ago

I would totally sacrifice graphics, I have often hate on PS unlike computer you can generally never turn the graphics down. I would 100% prefer to turn them down for split screen or to not lag out. I could care less about shadows in multiplayer most of the time.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Ok? Lower the graphic quality then. You want simpler graphics on a smaller screen anyway, there's no point doing super detailed rendering in that case.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Do you realize how many hours of work, and resources that would require? How are you gonna convince a publisher to give you tons of extra cash for a feature that won't get a return of investment?

by Terrible-Nobody-7597 1 week ago

The same way they convinced publishers in the 90s and 2000s, I suppose.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I don't buy that excuse. Why was it ok on a day an N64 yes now we would have such a problem. The games are harder to run on hardware but our hardware is way way better than that old stuff. Even if we had to take a performance hit then I guess we would have to but we would deal with it. This is about selling more downloads from their servers.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

what about online co op games?

by Public-Confection 1 week ago

It's not how people play games these days. People would prefer to sit in their own houses and play online with their friends that way

by Academic-Purple4457 1 week ago

For sure, I don't agree with it. I prefer not to socialize with friends over the internet, but it's far and away the most popular option right now

by Academic-Purple4457 1 week ago

Is it the most popular option because people prefer it, or is it the most popular option because we're not given alternatives? The only recent couch co op games I can think of are the Nintendo party games, like Mario Kart, Wario, Mario Party, Smash. There's a handful of indie games, but a lot of those aren't available on consoles and PC couch co op is usually a little more rough

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It's a more inclusive option which allows more people to play together than there otherwise would have been. All this also means more money for developers and studios so of course they're going to support it more.

by Academic-Purple4457 1 week ago

I'm not arguing that online co-op is bad, just that I wish couch co op was more common on consoles. After all, all the games I mentioned also have online co op

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I understand, I'm telling you that the market and gamers have already decided that couch co op isn't as important as online co op and I don't see that changing anytime soon

by Academic-Purple4457 1 week ago

Yeah.... you're not wrong, I just wish you were

by Anonymous 1 week ago

They also won't let me magnify the font size and UI for sitting 15 feet away from my 65".

by Ok_Line6663 1 week ago

Having a max interface interface that doesn't have the option to literally make gameplay impossible is not big enough lol.

by Ecstatic-Fact-4889 1 week ago

Played 4-player split screen private match Call of Duty for years with friends on a tiny TV and in retrospect I don't know how we did it

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I also mourn the loss of couch gaming... I miss playing games WITH my family and friends from the same room...

by Anonymous 1 week ago

And when they actually have split screen they usually split it vertically so you can't see anything but the ground and the sky straight in front of you.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Except now you have to get extra equipment to be able to hook up a stock vintage console, since many TVs are dropping the older inputs in favor of all HDMI.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I still have the box that allows hookups. I can go coax to hdmi. Also have a 55" reverse projection TV that's 30 years old...

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The ones that do have it though are absolutely glorious, with an 80" MarioKart and Super Smash Bros. has never been so clear, although these examples are a bit lacking given they were built to be playable on a 7" screen. Now the real deal is playing older splitscreen games through an emulator. Our wii is starting to fail (I think the GPU is damaged?) but even a cheap PC with bluetooth can handle mariokart wii with 1080p rendering.

by Marysenicolas 1 week ago

I just played 4 player split screen on my buddies 90" tv. It was amazing

by willa34 1 week ago

I wish more PC games had split screen co-op as well. Nivida Surround and two monitors means each player gets their own "full size" screen. With how light TV's are now it is a shame they don't have a way to force a split screen on to a second TV.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

And I haven't played a multi-player game since.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I use my PC now to emulate consoles for my kids to play split screen games. It's crazy that a feature from my childhood it's now seen as an inconvenience to major game producers.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

That's a terrible way to frame it. Confusing af

by pascale96 1 week ago

yeah i think splitscreen is becoming a thing of the past sadly.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Mario Cart is still rolling strong. Honestly for parties and such is an awesome one to have everyone jump on. 85 in screen means everyone has about 24X27 screen of their own.

by Consistent_Money 1 week ago

Either I'm dumb or the question is not well phrases.. Could you please explain why?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It's not saying one caused the other, more that ironically as split screen is becoming a better experience due to screen size it's being abandoned by developers.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

This phenomena is because of the graphical requirements that most systems push these days. Split screen is effectively having to render 2 scenes at the same time instead of just 1. Thats why the only games now a days that do do split screen are pretty simple graphic games like It Takes 2. Not saying it cant be done, but its not worth the cost to optimize something like that when the use cases arent large enough anymore. When majority of your base can coop online just fine, couch coop loses priority.

by Apprehensive-Job 1 week ago

Ehhhh, not really. Games that run 60fps for instance can easily do a 30fps split screen. The data is already present in memory and gpu render so it's not having to do a perfect 2x multiplier. And the games could also instead of doing 1440p 60fps could just do like 1080p 30fps split screen. It's definitely because companies want double dipping and you to use their network resources XBL and PSN. $$$ It takes work, but not too much work. Just look at how HaloInfonite it was nearly full functioning with some work around players found. Yet they patched that, ditched the split screen feature and said it was impossible.

by Eupton 1 week ago

They do do the 30fps split for 2 screens already on games. i didnt say it cant be done. But thats being reductive and assuming theres no loss. Simply reducing fps by half does not equal a 50% in resource savings, not even close. And its fine if you believe that its all nefarious and just to get people to buy more copies, but thats not really the case here. There are just a lot fewer people requesting this feature that the time and money to put into it is not worth it. You can rest assured that if couch coop was such an untapped market, there would be a developer and many others that would specialize in it. But its not untapped. Its very niche at this point. And before the anecdote "but me and my friend...", i said its niche, not non-existent. The demand just isnt there like it used to be with todays culture.

by Apprehensive-Job 1 week ago

They still pull it off in Gran Turismo 7...And even 4 player split screen... That argument is invalid...

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The only reason it doesn't get used is that it doesn't exist... There's zero actual good reason to not do it...Especially in games that would historically have had it... I've personally passed on a TON of games outright because they were something I was more interested in playing co-op with someone, but the developer didn't support it... I know I'm just one guy, but being social with my family and friends happens to be important to me, and historically, we've all been the types to gather around a console and game... The desire is there...You see chatter for it all the time... I think the guy up there is right about them trying to sell more copies of games with co-op mechanics by removing splitscreen than providing it...

by Anonymous 1 week ago

How so...? It's 100% true.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Their point is that it doesn't make sense and that there's irony in that.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Maybe reword this as: as tvs are getting bigger and better for split screen games, less games support a split screen function.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Exactly what I was thinking

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Lmao perfect

by Anonymous 1 week ago

this is a wendys

by StandardExtension859 1 week ago

What's the TL; DR?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

That doesn't really have anything to do with TV size. A lot of local co-op couch games are not created anymore because they don't sell that much.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The point is that it was more popular when TVs were not conducive to it, but now that they are, couch co-op is gone

by Anonymous 1 week ago