A New Year, A New Co Op PC Obsession
Every year on PC it feels like the early months are ruled by one surprise co op hit. It is usually a budget friendly game that explodes on Steam, pulls in huge concurrent player numbers and becomes the title everyone is talking about in Discord for a few weeks.
In the past few years we have seen this pattern again and again:
- 2025: REPO in February with over 270,000 concurrent players
- 2024: Palworld in January hitting more than 2.1 million concurrents
- 2023: Sons of the Forest in February with over 400,000 concurrents
- 2021: Valheim in February with over 500,000 concurrents
Not every year fits perfectly and 2022 is a bit of an outlier, but the overall trend is clear. Early in the year a co op focused PC game often comes out of nowhere, dominates the Steam charts and gives PC players something social to sink hundreds of hours into.
This year there is a strong contender for that role. StarRupture, a sci fi co op basebuilder from Creepy Jar, is arriving in early access on Steam and it checks a lot of the same boxes that previous hits have.
What Is StarRupture?
StarRupture is a cooperative sci fi basebuilding and survival game set on an alien planet. You and your friends land on a hostile world covered in strange landscapes and bizarre structures off in the distance that practically beg to be explored.
The core loop blends a few very popular PC gaming ingredients:
- Basebuilding with friends You work together to design, build and expand your shared base. The focus is on cooperation so that players can divide tasks and specialize.
- Survival and crafting Like many modern PC survival games you gather resources, craft tools and items and unlock better tech as you progress.
- Alien threats The planet is not empty. Weird alien bugs and other creatures roam the world and will happily ruin your day if you are not careful.
- Automation and factories For fans of games like Satisfactory there are large supply chains to build, with automated factories you can construct, connect and upgrade to keep resources flowing.
The game comes from Creepy Jar, the studio behind Green Hell, a well regarded survival game. That history gives StarRupture some credibility among PC players who want a survival experience with decent depth, good tension and a meaningful progression curve.
The early access version already features a large map filled with unusual landmarks and environmental details that encourage exploration. There is a guided tutorial to get you started, but it only hints at how complex survival, crafting and factory design can become as you push deeper into the game.
There is also a looming presence in the sky an alien star that by the name of the game is clearly not as stable as it looks. While the article does not spoil what eventually happens, it is clear that something significant related to that star is waiting later in the progression.
Why StarRupture Fits The Early Year Co Op Trend
Beyond the actual gameplay, StarRupture lines up neatly with what has helped other early year co op games catch fire on PC.
Reasonable pricing
The base price is 20 dollars, and it launches with a 20 percent discount so early adopters can jump in at around 16 dollars. That is well below the 60 and 70 dollar prices that have become common for big releases. It makes StarRupture an easier impulse buy, especially for groups of friends trying to convince everyone to grab the same game.
The article notes that the general price floor for games has crept up over the past few years, with titles that might once have been 20 dollars now often launching at 30. Against that backdrop, StarRupture feels like a pleasant throwback in terms of affordability.
Co op focus
StarRupture is built around playing with others. Setting up shared bases, tackling threats together and collaborating on complex factory chains are all at the heart of the experience. That kind of design encourages word of mouth growth as players invite friends and the game spreads through friend groups and communities.
Early access survival sandbox
Like many of the previous surprise hits, StarRupture is launching in early access. That means it has room to grow and improve over time, with new features, content and systems potentially added based on community feedback.
For PC players this can be a plus. A living survival sandbox that evolves with each update has proven to be a powerful formula for long term engagement, especially if the core building and automation loop is satisfying from the start.
At the moment the author of the original piece has only spent a few early hours in the game and is not ready to fully recommend it yet. However the initial impressions are positive enough that they plan to keep playing through the week, which is a good sign for curious PC gamers following new releases.
Whether StarRupture will become the next Palworld or Valheim level phenomenon is impossible to say yet. But it clearly has a lot of the qualities that tend to drive co op success on PC: accessible pricing, a strong focus on playing with friends, deep building and automation systems for long term goals and a mysterious alien world that invites exploration and experimentation.
If you enjoy survival crafting games, love building complex factories with your group and are looking for a fresh PC co op experience to kick off the year, StarRupture is worth keeping an eye on as it launches into early access on Steam.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/survival-crafting/the-last-5-years-have-all-kicked-off-with-a-huge-co-op-hit-on-steam-and-this-sci-fi-survival-game-from-the-makers-of-green-hell-might-be-2026s-ticket/
