Somebody's controller hits the couch cushion first. It's midnight, the credits are rolling on another two-hour session, and nobody actually wants to log off. What happens in the next ten minutes says more about 2026's gaming habits than the session that just ended.
Groups that build a habit around co-op play rarely just switch the console off and scatter. The energy that made a session work, watching a friend's screen, reacting in real time, calling out the next move, doesn't disappear the moment the credits hit. It tends to move sideways into whatever else the group can do together on one screen or side by side on their phones. For a lot of Kiwi groups that means live tables that stream a dealer in real time rather than a solitary slot reel, since the appeal is identical: everyone watching the same outcome land at once. Casinos.com's own rundown of the best casino sites in NZ tends to sort on exactly that basis, ranking platforms by whether they support shared, watchable formats instead of five people staring at five separate screens.
The scale here is easy to underestimate. Co-op titles pulled in $4.1 billion on Steam in the first half of 2025 alone, an 11% jump on the same period the year before. Hazelight's own numbers back up the trend from the publisher side: the studio confirmed in April that its trilogy has sold 50 million copies combined, including 30 million for It Takes Two alone and seven million for Split Fiction, which had barely been out a year at that point. R.E.P.O., the horror-comedy scavenger hunt nobody saw coming, has crossed 19 million units and over $140 million in revenue since its February 2025 launch, and it's still averaging more than 20,000 concurrent players a day well over a year on, a retention rate most single-player releases never get close to.
New Zealand's own game development sector has ridden a version of the same wave. Local studios pushed past NZD 1 billion in annual revenue this year, two full years ahead of the industry association's own target, after posting NZD 759.57 million and 38.6% growth just the year before. A country that size punching above its weight in games doesn't happen by accident, and it lines up with what's showing up in local living rooms.
That habit isn't a coincidence in this part of the world, and it shows up clearly once you look past the sales charts and into how New Zealanders actually play. The 2025 New Zealand Plays report found that 76% of New Zealanders who game do so with other people, and the bias toward cooperative modes is strongest among younger players, a reversal of the older, more competitive-leaning crowd the report also tracked. Nine in ten Kiwi households have at least one device set up for gaming, and almost half keep three or more in rotation. That's a country built for handing over the second controller, not hoarding the only one, which explains why local Discord and Steam co-op circles tend to stick together across genres rather than splinter off once one game runs its course.
The same four people who spent a weekend on Split Fiction's dragon-taming, cyber-ninja chaos are often the same four who'll open a laptop for something else entirely once the pizza boxes come out, and that pattern repeats itself weekend after weekend rather than fading once the credits roll for good. If that particular flavour of chaos is new to you, our full co-op breakdown of the game covers what makes the genre-hopping campaign worth the two-player commitment before you even get to what happens after.
None of this is about swapping one hobby for another. Co-op gaming and shared-screen social formats are both symptoms of the same preference, doing things together instead of alone, and 2026's numbers suggest that preference is only getting stronger. Somebody's still going to drop the controller on the cushion first. The night just keeps going after that.
Think back to the last time you crowded onto a couch for a gaming session. It’s the atmosphere and the sense of having real eyes on what’s going on that makes the game matter. It’s also what makes it fun.
Some titles are built entirely around teamwork, others suit relaxed couch sessions or a shared save. Switch 2 has left and right Joy-Con 2, though some games still need a second controller. GameChat needs a Nintendo Switch Online membership, with voice via the built-in mic and video via a separate USB-C camera.
Online play is now firmly established among Australian players. In the Australian National University's January 2025 ANUpoll, 56.1% of people who had gambled during the previous year said they mainly participated online. The nationally representative study covered 3,387 Australian adults and formed part of a six-wave research programme d