Why fight, when you can play together? The co-op surge in recent years is easy to see, and even though the word "friendslop" is thrown around here and there, it's clear that gamers are enjoying spending time working with their friends in PvE experiences like Lethal Company, R.E.P.O., Peak, Split Fiction, and more.
The GameDiscoverCo newsletter recently dug into the rise of co-op on Steam, showing through the surge of certain keywords reaching the games grossing >$100k how players are looking for different kinds of experiences. Between 2022 and 2023, the amount of new games that grossed the all-important >$100k margin with co-op as a keyword went from 3.2% to 5.1%. The amount of new games with co-op jumped from 1.4% to 2.1% between 2023 and 2025, too, meaning that while we're not seeing a complete overload of co-op experiences, developers are catching onto the fact these games are drawing players' eyes.
Elsewhere, we see a strong increase in keywords like cosy, survival, build, and crafting, showing the type of experiences people want to have with their friends. Cosy especially had a huge jump, going from 0.4% in 2022 to 3.5% of 2025 games grossing more than $100,000. More people are making cosy games, but a lot more people are willing to play them, as they're inviting games that let you get some downtime after a long day. According to GameDiscoverCo, audiences just react positively to that label, too. A pushback against the years of pressurised difficulty in some games, perhaps?