I agree. Anyone developer who has had to work on multi-player games will never say "just add multi-player". The whole way you approach the game changes massively.

It was a massive mistake in game like this tho, the mistake many other games like that died by.

Appeal of buying essentially party game where you need other people in same room to get the most of it (games like that are rarely good singleplayer) is very low, even worse in pandemic.

Not saying it would make game succeed, as that's still 90% marketing in oversaturated indie market, but it is a thing that would make me go "nope" if I saw what I like then read that it is local-only, hell, it did in many cases.

I'm still quite surprised by the fact that Overcooked succeeded without an online multiplayer mode.

*I don't know how successful Overcooked was, but it was successful enough for them to make Overcooked 2

I think overcooked has a quite different audience, being cooperative rather than competitive. I won't buy a competitive local multiplayer game nowadays, whereas I've bought a lot of cooperative ones to play with my SO, and that's probably fairly common?

Of course online multi-player is difficult to pull off but with console sale numbers for the Wii U I think the time spent on porting the game to the Wii U could've been used to get online multi-player to work. They spent an estimated 50% of their two years development time on a console that was pretty much a failure at the time the game came out.

The PS4 was well ahead of any other console in sales long before the game was released onto the Wii U. I don't know their exact sales distribution, but I think a better game on PS4 and maybe Xbox One would've sold a lot more copies.