Friendslop: is collaborative play starting to replace PvP?

Ever since the COVID pandemic, people have been looking for ways to strengthen connections with the people around them. And with the conflict of data centres and RAM prices, many AAA games have been struggling to maintain control of the videogame market, higher costs for memory and production ultimately raising selling prices for consoles and videogames alike - putting off consumers.

However, in October 2023, indie developer Zeekerss released Lethal Company: a cooperative horror game where you need to collect valuables to fill a quota all whilst avoiding monsters. Lethal Company could be seen as the first step in low priced, simple games storming the videogame market. The game had 240,817 players at its peak on Steam alone, comparing this to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (a game released in November 2023) has only had 14,766 players at its peak. This could be explained by Steam not being the most preferred platform for Call of Duty but also could be a sign that players might not want to play the same experience just with a reskin and remaster.

'Friendslop' is the new term describing games that revolve around teamwork to fill quotas, explore areas, and encourage social interaction. A way to think about this could be to say that the game is primarily fun because you are playing with friends, not necessarily because the game is of the best quality.

'Friendslop' games are typically low-fidelity, chaotic, and a one-time low-cost purchase. Taking games like R.E.P.O., RV There Yet, and Peak into account, all very successful games made by a small, independent team on a low budget, using Lethal Company’s structure as a guideline. In a time where social interaction is more important than ever, playing a PvP game like Overwatch might not be the ideal space for this. A tense and toxic environment could cause ruptures within groups and add unnecessary stress into a gaming session.

A new game from August of this year is Big Walk: a cooperative game where you simply walk around an island and solve puzzles. This game explores ways to encourage communication with whoever you play with in a variety of different ways. A large change with this game compared to other games in the ‘friendslop’ genre is that there are no monsters, no quotas, and nothing to ‘clip farm.’ The developers simply want you to bond and learn about each other. It caused an uproar with streamers like Jynxzi who complained that there was no content to gain from this and immediately refunded the game on stream sparking debate online.

Big Walk is now leading the Golden Joystick Awards with 6 nominations (with Peak having 4 in 2025) and could be set to prove that gaming should be for friendship not content.