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> In the past ten years we have seen local multiplayer evaporate.

Split screen multiplayer evaporated for many reasons. Besides business it's also technology.

I'm not sure you'll find a single indie split screen multiplayer game that uses a modern, queued graphics pipeline (Unity HDRP or Unreal 4+). Even among big commercial games, Fortnite notably supports 2 player split screen, but Rocket League, Borderlands and Gears of War are all Unreal 3 I think.

It takes two was GOTY.

I think it’s more that split screen is almost exclusively the domain of ‘party’ games these days.

Me and my son love couch co-op games, but yeah, doing split-screen can be hard to get right, especially around text and UI elements.

Local multiplayer is back thanks to Steam and their "Remote Play Together" feature. Remote players connect to the hosts screen share. It is excellent. No extra licenses required.

And then they got burned by Sony at E3 and the whole sharing policies got rewritten.