When we look at our release calender, its fascinating to note that even in this digital age without any retail restrictions, there's still one day in the week most of the games are released: Thursday. What's more, almost everyone agrees that Saturday and Sunday are off limits for new releases.
While October saw a great amount of survival horror titles released (not only, but especially) on the Steam store, the actual new hot thing™ in the co-op meta seems to be shop games. You know, those titles like Old Market Simulator where you have to manage a supermarket together with friends and make all those customers happy. Luckily, this month also saw a ton of other, perhaps more desirable releases - for example, Ys X: Nordics, the newest entry in the long-running JRPG series.
Looking at the release calender for September, it has become clear to us that we and our friends somehow need more time to play games. Way more time. It's just not enough to carve out a couple of hours in the evening/night on the weekends to enjoy all that co-op goodness. So if you vote for us in whatever election is coming up, we hereby pledge
August started slow in terms of new co-op releases - very slow. For a hot minute, we feared we would have nothing to play and would need to go out into the summer heat and enjoy life or something. Luckily, publishers and developers came to the rescue releasing long awaited titles like World of Goo 2 (sadly only the Switch-version has co-op), Cat Quest III, and another (excellent) re-release of DOOM and DOOM II. Meanwhile, Petroglyph's newest RTS, 9-Bit Armies: A Bit Too Far left Steam Early Access together with Core Keeper, a "mining sandbox adventure." Additionally, Gunpla-fans can once again enjoy virtually building and battling their Gundam thanks to the release of Gundam Breaker 4.
At least to the surprise of us, 7 Days to Die finally reached version number 1.0 in July. After twelve years of public development, the open-world zombie survival mix is finished - at least on paper. Even after reaching the milestone, the devs don't show any sign of stopping after all. Meanwhile, our review is now over seven years old. Maybe it's time for an update?
Holy mackerel, what a month! It felt like every publisher and developer on Earth announced a new co-op title, resulting in 235 new entries to our database. Still, looking back at the last four years since our Database Master joined us, June 2024 was actually on par with previous years. His overwhelming feeling of "there's too much stuff!!!!" was just based on the literally hundreds of games he had to wade through in order to find all that co-op goodness. So many showcases happened during Summer Games Fest 2024, and then directly afterwards, Steam Next Fest June 2024 started. It was definitely an insane month for us gamers.
Another 106 entries were added to our database this month. We now feature over 14,000 (active) co-op games, and this number will certainly continue to climb. That's most likely more than anyone can play in a lifetime, but I'm sure we are all trying our best. So before Geoff Keighley bombards us with another three hours of ads and announcements next week, let's take a quick look back at May.
...and another month has gone down the drain. So what happened in April? Well, Toaplan-fans on PC were able to rejoice as Bitwave Games released their final volume of games. Truxton II, Grind Stormer (no co-op), Dogyuun, and Twin Hawk can now be enjoyed on modern systems with a handful of quality-of-life improvements. Don't despair, console users! You finally got access to ArcRunner, Cook, Serve Delicious! (yes, the first one), Hammerwatch Anniversary Edition, Hammerwatch II, and PERISH. Oh, and on PlayStation, you can now feel like a true pirate thanks to Microsoft's Sea of Thieves hitting the platform just yesterday.
What's up with the gaming industry ? Seems like most of the hyped up releases in the last year hit the streets and got immediately dumped in the "Mixed" (at best) reviews category for everyone to soon forget. We won't name any names, but it is sad to see - especially for co-op titles that depend so much on an active player base.
After a surprisingly quiet January, our release calendar was once again filled with quite a bit of co-op fodder this month. Our team's favourite was by far the democracy-simulator, Helldivers 2. Despite the initial server-issues, we just keep coming back to it time and time again. Also of note, quite a few titles like Sons Of The Forest, Smalland: Survive the Wilds, and Timemelters finally left their Early Access state behind, which is always nice to see. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Skull and Bones, on the other hand... well, although they also finally hit store shelves, it doesn't seem like the wait was really worth it. Always sad to see - especially for co-op titles.
January 2024 was a... strange month. We've counted only 20 co-op releases across all platforms. Yes, this time of year is usually a bit more on the lighter side with all publishers and developers preparing the big spring push. But still: This is the lowest amount of new titles we've seen in a January in a long time. Perhaps everyone was just too afraid to launch in the same month as Palworld? A bit less Pokémon with guns and more traditional open-world-survival-crafting as it turns out but still a very huge success with players.
Here it is: 2024. And with it, we're leaving behind 2023: a year that is already considered by many to be the best 365 days for gaming in at least a decade. Granted, not all expected blockbusters hit the mark. This was especially hard on us when the title featured a solid co-op option (Redfall anyone?). But there was way too much good, cooperative stuff released to keep us complaining for too long about these mishaps.
