Not artificial, just cyclical. There have been several popular co-op games recently and the industry follows trends.
But you're missing the elephant in the room. Streaming. Co-op games are ripe for streamer cross-pollination. Streamers are incentivized to play together because it potentially grows their individual followings. By giving them a game to do that within, you can pull a lot of eyes to your game. Friendly fire fits with the theme of Helldivers 2, but it also creates fertile ground for clipable and memeable moments which spreads awareness of the game. It's free marketing.
It's not unique to co-op. Party games and social competitive stuff like Among Us also can target this niche.
Another thing too is that coop games, when successful, can lead to (very loosely) 4x profits simply because you can get entire groups of friends buying a game in bunches.
I feel like Borderlands set the trend for this, given how they ended up selling Steam-bundles based on that idea.
Maybe. But if you've ever tried to get a group of > 4 friends together to play a game, you know that is gets exponentially difficult to find open windows. If you want an 8-man co-op, you basically need a static group with scheduled playing times. 3-4 you can manage with a "anyone want to play?"
Not artificial, just cyclical. There have been several popular co-op games recently and the industry follows trends.
But you're missing the elephant in the room. Streaming. Co-op games are ripe for streamer cross-pollination. Streamers are incentivized to play together because it potentially grows their individual followings. By giving them a game to do that within, you can pull a lot of eyes to your game. Friendly fire fits with the theme of Helldivers 2, but it also creates fertile ground for clipable and memeable moments which spreads awareness of the game. It's free marketing.
It's not unique to co-op. Party games and social competitive stuff like Among Us also can target this niche.
Another thing too is that coop games, when successful, can lead to (very loosely) 4x profits simply because you can get entire groups of friends buying a game in bunches.
I feel like Borderlands set the trend for this, given how they ended up selling Steam-bundles based on that idea.
Maybe. But if you've ever tried to get a group of > 4 friends together to play a game, you know that is gets exponentially difficult to find open windows. If you want an 8-man co-op, you basically need a static group with scheduled playing times. 3-4 you can manage with a "anyone want to play?"