Scroll through the comments page of just about any single player game on Steam and you'll find messages like the following: "game is ok would be better with co-op". Big, impressive titles with hundreds of hours of gameplay are released on a regular basis, but there's still a legion of players out there that refuse to have fun unless they can romp around with their friends. We could even argue that some of the biggest games of the last five years attained popularity largely because of their co-op features.
As soon as you leave the PC and console markets, though, the co-op cheerleaders disappear. Take a stroll through iOS or Android offerings and you'll find only a few multiplayer or co-op games, and nobody seems to be yelling for more. The situation is almost as bad on 3DS and Vita, making us wonder if portable gaming and co-op are about as compatible as peanut butter and sawdust.
Here's the big question on our minds: are mobile games inherently single player in nature, or has co-op just not caught on yet?
Very Angry Birds
We started our quest with a game that's available on nearly every modern gaming device imaginable: Angry Birds. The series from Rovio began as an iOS game that sold over 12 million copies in the first nine months. It spawned sequels and spin-offs that have made an appearance on PC, browser, console and handheld devices, not to mention a cartoon series and real world plush toys.
While all of those ports were proliferating, the basic gameplay remained the same: pull back on a slingshot, fling a bird across the screen, hit some pigs. Angry Birds Star Wars was released as a mobile game, and soon afterwards it worked its way to consoles. This new "reworked" version sported a feature none of the mobile releases had: multiplayer. Not just multiplayer, but both competitive and co-op modes for up to four players. It was a pretty basic feature, little more than people taking turns flinging things, but it was a departure from the mobile versions that showed that even Rovio knew what non-mobile gamers want.
Hate the Player, Hate the Game
To get some player perspectives on the subject of portable multiplayer, we did a survey with a group of random gamers to find out what they thought about co-op on mobile devices. Their responses were practically identical. To paraphrase: "Sure, I'd try a co-op game on my phone, but it would probably suck. Also, you look really handsome in those shoes."
Mobile games have a reputation for being crummy imitations of "real" games on PC and console. They're distractions that keep your hands busy. Mobile gamers aren't even seen as gamers, they're just average people who have phones in their pockets who want to stare at a screen for a few minutes while they're in line at Starbucks. Mobile game mechanics take all of four seconds to learn, and no real thought is required to win, just repetition. That's not exactly fertile ground for multiplayer experiences. Even if it were, it seems people are more embarrassed about the mobile games they play than any console or PC games they're into. Why would you ever want to share the shame with a friend?
This is a convenient stereotype for what mobile games represent, but it isn't exactly an accurate picture of the mobile gaming world. At least, not what it's trying to be. Bigger, better, more "serious" games are trickling onto mobile devices to provide more than just button mashing screen tapping mechanics, and sometimes they carry co-op modes with them.
The Devs are There
We pestered a few developers who have released mobile games with multiplayer modes, hoping to uncover the conspiracy behind the anti-cooperative movement. One of those developers was Henry Smith, creator of Spaceteam.
Spaceteam is a unique member of the mobile co-op world. It allows up to eight local players to join together to run a simulated spaceship, calling all of the shots on their individual devices that display custom panels based on their role in the crew. The fun part is Spaceteam doesn't even have a single player mode, it's designed for groups. Since smartphones are in just about everyone's pockets, there's very little barrier for entry. Just whip out your device and start playing.
We asked Henry if he felt there's player demand for co-op games in the mobile world:
I think a lot of people just don't know what they're missing. The biggest games in the world like World of Warcraft and League of Legends have strong cooperative aspects [and] if we had more mobile games that captured that feeling of working together (but on a smaller scale) then co-op games could become a lot more popular.
What's the one-word response we're looking for? Pretty sure it's "testify".
Toilet Humor
Everybody has a smartphone these days. If you don't, you're just pretending because you dropped your last one in the toilet. They're so pervasive they actually have a reputation for making us less social. Why talk to people at the dinner table when you can check your Twitter feed and post pictures of your food on Instagram? If you need to interact with everyone, just send a text. That's how we do it these days.
That anti-social reputation extends into mobile games. Phones don't make us want to interact with people, they're there so we can shut everything else out while we pretend to be super social by typing things into Facebook for our 1,017 "friends". They create this little world where you're the star, the big, bloated, gassy celestial body everything else in the solar system orbits. Firing up a game where you have to interact with people in real-time would destroy that.
Fortunately, not every game developer agrees that mobile platforms are destined for solo play. More and more games with co-op modes linger on the horizon. Many of them are ports, and many of them are sick with freemium features, but we've gotta start somewhere, right?
Actually, maybe the real reason why there are so few co-op games on mobile devices is because everyone's playing them in the bathroom. Toilets only support one person at a time. Maybe what we really need is a co-op toilet, then the games will follow.
We'll just leave you with that mental image.