The Future is Friendslop

Spend enough time as an industry expert and you run the risk of thinking you know what’s going on. Major titles were always going to chase photorealistic graphics, until they didn’t. A few major AAA franchises were always going to dominate the industry, until they didn’t. Live service was going to provide publicly traded gaming companies with reliable income, until it didn’t. There are always these moments when it feels like the industry has reached a point where it is going to stay and then no sooner do we try to make sense of that before a curveball knocks us in the face.

For the past year or so, the curveball in question has been Friendslop.

Friendslop is an ill-defined term that tends to refer to cheap co-op games designed to produce a few dozen hours of hijinks before its players move on to the next appropriately priced title, usually under $10. Top titles include RV There Yet, Lethal Company, Peak, R.E.P.O, Meccha Chameleon and a whole lot more. If you want to find an origin point, you could do a whole lot worse than Among Us. I also see a lot of Sea of Thieves in these, and there are likely older examples to draw on.

They come with different degrees of jank, enough to remind us that these are not AAA products but also enough polish to distinguish them from Roblox. The name was pejorative when it was first coined, I think, but it quickly became something between a point of pride and a term of endearment.

Still, you can’t really get over the word slop. I’ve been surprised to talk to industry friends looking down on these things, as if they’re all these low-effort cash-in attempts or 50 shades of Roblox or some other symptom of kids these days. I get it: it’s new and scary. But there are a lot of reasons why we should all be excited to start moving in this direction.

First off, the economic models here are the sorts of things traditionalists have been begging for for a decade at least. A lot of these are premium games that people play for a while before getting a new one. Cheap ones, but still: good news! After a lot of hand-wringing about whether or not the next generation would simply leave storefronts entirely in favor of some sort of live-service addiction or UGC platform, the kids just started buying these games on their own volition. So that’s a win.

More importantly, these things do, genuinely, feel new. These are not open-world RPGs and these are not Hero Shooters. They play by different rules, where wackiness is every bit as important as any kind of metagame. They represent a design ethos that manages to worm its way into different genres and will likely make it to the core of even large productions in a few years.

In an industry with a lot of grim news, the rise of Friendslop is a bright spot. It reminds me a little of the movie industry, where we had all been resigned to an endless procession of big budget superhero movies until streaming choked the whole thing out anyways. And then, all of a sudden, Obsession and Backrooms blew the lid of things with some experimental work from young, Youtube-hardened directors and all of a sudden Gen-Z was back in the theater. And it doesn’t exactly strain the imagination to think that this trend bolstered traditional blockbusters like The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Curveballs keep flying.

It’s easy to imagine a world where Friendslop keeps evolving, where younger gamers spend more time inside the Steam Store and find more weird things to play, where AAA gets a bit of a rising tide and where, most importantly, people get to keep playing strange new games. Despite the title of this post, this doesn’t mean that Friendslop will always define the future. But it reminds us that the industry will have one.

That’s the month. If you want to hire any of the brilliant minds at Mighty Diamonds, head to our Website.

What’s Dave Playing?

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book: This thing didn’t score great, but many geniuses were misunderstood in their time. I’ve been playing this with my four year old, but it would work under any circumstances: a research adventure where you have to study a procession of strange creatures by messing around with them and seeing what happens. No fail state, precious few enemies, just play and joy. It’s kind of a sandbox platformer that straddles the line between new and comfortable and comes highly recommended.