Split screen is important for attracting "casual" players who don't care about climbing the online rankings and whatnot, but only having fun. It's kind of a viral thing in that they play at a friends house, and if they have fun they're more likely to pick up a copy themselves.

I would even go so far as to say that split-screen multiplayer is the sole reason the Halo franchise is the huge success that it is. Sure, the online community is huge and robust now, but it would never have gotten off the ground if it weren't for the first game having great split screen.

No debate needed.  I just thought it was an odd comment.

I think split screen and coop would be nice to have features, but only if they could be implemented without negatively impacting the single player experience.  Percentage wise, very few people will ever play coop, and even fewer will play split screen mp.  I wouldn't want the developer to shoe-horn in these features to satisfy a small minority.

Team Fortress is on the 360/PS3 no?  What does MK:Wii have to do with anything?  Mediocre game that is only made decent by playing with a friend.  Not every game needs Co-op or splitscreen.

And anyone who played split screen games like Goldeneye 64 or Perfect Dark 64 can attest to the horrible frame rate drops experienced in the split-screen variations of the game.   They were still great fun,  but definitely suffered from issues. 

  The biggest reason these features aren't implemented is two fold:

        -   Any slight performance drop will get them slaughtered in reviews.  (Notice even a slightest MENTION of frame rate   drop in KZ2 no matter how minor and everyone jumps on it.)

        -   Online gaming wasn't available/mainstream back when split-screen was at it's peak.

HVS has said they were aiming to hit 60fps. I dont know if they've made any improvments since saying that, but they are trying.

The market for online multiplayer is much smaller than that for local multiplayer. Consider how many people don't even have their Wii's connected to a good connection. Local multiplayer only requires a couple of remotes and nunchuks.

The demand for online is exaggerated on the internet, because people who play online are more likely to be the ones who go to gaming forums.

Split screen is for local multiplayer, period. Do none of you play when friends/family are near the TV? I'd like for people to join me playing games instead of watching, and I'm not about to buy another console and TV just to do it.

This may not be as important for KZ2 (though I might actually consider buying it if it did), but The Conduit is on the Wii, which really stresses on having local multiplayer. Not including it is a big mistake, IMO.

Do people think Halo would have been as big a hit without its split screen? I wonder...

Looking at Halo online numbers I would say yes, it would have still been a big hit.

Halo for the Xbox needed splitscreen because console online gaming wasn't as big as it is now. LIVE was just getting it's feet off the ground back then.

@Demotruk

Over 15M+ Gold Live subscribers wish to have a word with you.

PSN is free so I can't comment on how many there, but they do have over 20M accounts.

PC gamers... well I don't think I need to explain myself here.

Unless of course your comment is aimed just at The Conduit and the Wii, because I am pretty damn sure that online gaming is much bigger on HD consoles than people give credit for.

Well, nearly every bigger commercial game today is nothing but graphic whoring. Nothing but graphics are made better. Next step could be on rail shooters(Umbrella chronicles on WII...) or games with very restricted gaming areas(Heavy rain on PS3...).

Lets use a bit old nvidia demo as an nice example of this. When you pack all graphical abilities of GPU on one object you get something like this(Click for different large picture.):

Source for demo(Its for 8800+ cards...):

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_humanhead_home.html

And even older Nalu with her incredible dynamic hair(Click pic for youtube action):

(6800+ cards)

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_nalu_downloads.html

Of course when you do that, nothing else can be done properly. :)

Splitscreen is a lot of extra work, it hurts the fullscreen version by having two viewpoints rather than one (thus world/render objects cannot be culled as efficiently, and more data has to be accessed, or even just plain exist in memory at once -- physics data, for example. More memory there means less for textures, etc... hurts the single-viewpoint game in the end), and I don't think its a very commonly used feature to the end-user.

Cost/benefit == not so good. That's why its not done much anymore.

I'd rather have an amazing one player experianced cranked to the max then have it brought down by a splitscreen element that I'll rarely use except for in the campeign once. I play every game I can split-screen with my girlfriend but she only likes one to two games online. That being said, i've got other games splitscreen, this baby is just for me. :)