Hype for Split Fiction drove players to play It Takes Two

Split Fiction, the latest co-op adventure game from Hazelight Studios, was released today. Hazelight has done it again, as you can read in our review. Today, the two-player game hit twenty-four thousand concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB. To get context for it, I decided to check how many players It Takes Two hit when it launched, only to find that It Takes Two has also hit twenty-four thousand concurrent players with in the last twenty-four hours and had an all-time peak three months ago. Remember that It Takes Two was released in early 2021, so about four years ago.

Hype for Split Fiction boosted It Takes Two player count on Steam

Split Fiction follows the story of two authors who get trapped in virtual recreations of their stories. In Hazelight tradition, the game requires two players. But if you don’t have a friend willing to spend the money on a new game, Split Fiction also continues the tradition of the Friend’s Pass, allowing Split Fiction owners to invite a friend to play with them even if they haven’t bought a copy for themselves. This time around, the Friend’s Pass includes cross play, meaning you don’t have to be on the same platform to play together.

Reviews for Split Fiction have been glowing. On Metacritic it currently sits as the best reviewed game so far of 2025 with a 91 / 100, just barely outdoing Monster Hunter Wilds by one point and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 by three. Today, on Steam’s best-selling charts, Split Fiction has risen to the number two spot, just underneath Monster Hunter Wilds. The hype appears to have been justified. It Takes Two currently has an overall score of 88 / 100, but it still won the ultimate prize, Game of the Year, when it was released in 2021. So, it makes sense that fans of the last game would be looking forward to this newest entry.

Three months ago, which was around the time that Split Fiction was shown off at the Game Awards, It Takes Two hit an all-time peak on Steam of seventy-one thousand concurrent players on Steam. These numbers far outdo its previous records. For the first four years since its release, It Takes Two’s Steam peak was at thirty-two thousand, which matches Split Fiction’s current peak. Based on this, it’s not hard to tell that these Hazelight games have found something special. These are not the kinds of games that are easily thrown to the side when something new comes around. With so few co-op games being created at this level, Hazelight is the go-to developer when players feel an interest.

Will Split Fiction’s Steam count grow over the weekend? Will it reach its peak just before the next Hazelight game comes out in another four years? We will have to wait and see for now. Currently, it seems that many of the people playing It Takes Two over the last few months have made the jump to the new game. But it’s good to know that there really is a market for these kinds of games and that players will gladly return to a four-year-old game if they need to.

Split Fiction

March 6, 2025

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• co-op
• Hazelight