My guess is that a lot of the big money games nowadays are multiplatform, are not optimized for any platform, and suffer huge framerate losses when doing split-screen. Part of this I attribute to the huge costs that go into producing games nowadays (Crysis cost a cool $22 million), along with the Wal-Martization of gaming studios (EA is content to crap out a huge volume of titles at the lowest cost possible). And since online gaming is so prevalent, you're going to have more incentive to develop your online code instead of optimizing your game for 2-4 players on the same system.

There definitely is a market for multiplayer social games, but they are taking completely different forms than they have in the past – I think it's hard to argue that games like Guitar Hero aren't insanely popular and spawning all sorts of clones. The Nintendo Wii survives solely on the popularity of it's party games, and for every co-op shooter we lose, we get some real gems like Geometry Wars, Rock Band, or Trauma Center.

Still, I kind of miss the golden days of a co-op Halo campaign, more games need to be able to execute on a multiplayer story mode that doesn't have wacky game balance issues.

Just because there are other social gaming options, doesn't mean I should forgive a company for taking the social gaming experience from games that used to have it. I just don't understand why other people don't get as upset. I mean, if you plugged in Wii Sports, loaded up Wii Tennis, and found out that it was only a single player game unless you had multiple Wiis set up. Would you stand for that? Absolutely not, the Nintendo forums would explode with complaints.

As for co-oping main campaigns. I understand the technical limitations of allowing this (online or split screen). If that is absent from a game it's forgivable. But I refuse to believe that letting 4 players blow each other to high hell on one screen is more difficult than allowing 16 players to do the same from around the world simultaneously.