Games like Among Us, RV There Yet, Peak, Lethal Company, etc. I don't mind them so long as there's no woke elements to them, though I've never actually played any of them myself. I have two groups of streamers that I like (Fooster/Fisk/Olafpawbelt and Splitsie/Capac/TFE/Shack) that play them from time to time and it's pretty enjoyable watching them. These sorts of games strike me as games that are more meant to be watched than played yourself. I doubt many of them sell that many units, and they typically are only popular for a couple of weeks before being replaced by the next one.
I bet a lot of copies sold are people who think 'oh man, this looked like fun when I saw $streamer play it, I can't wait to play it with my friends' and then they never do. They seem to be pretty cheap, so if an indie dev can provide a few weeks of enjoyment for $9.99, honestly there are worse ripoffs in the gaming world.
I have never touched a friend slop game and likely never will.
However, it's one of the few good things to come out of today's technology.
Games encouraging communication, teamwork, and critical thinking are all facets NOT being taught in schools, and sadly not being taught at home either.
Streamers are inadvertently working against the zeitgeist by promoting such titles, because AAA games are all about promoting the opposite effect: They want people competing, silent, and following the yellow indicators without question nor thought.
The emergent, sandboxy-style approach some of these friend slop games introduce are good for building problem solving skills, and helping people delegate roles to fixing issues.
This won't stay around for long, though.
When AAA studios and the elites catch wind of this trend they will usurp its momentum like they have every other genre and then put a wench in it, make it lame, and make it gay.
True if you're playing the game with friends. If you're watching other people play them, where the "friends" are a "collab" negotiated by an agency, you're getting none of that. You're getting choreographed chaos to keep you engaged.
That's not the game's fault but it's worth mentioning.
That's a good caveat I forgot to add, which is a very salient: second-hand problem solving skills aren't problem solving skills at all (unless it's specifically a tutorial to help you problem solve).
Just like, watching a streamer play puzzle/RTS games and complete them won't help you get better at understanding how to play and beat puzzle/RTS games.
That's old multiplayer games. This friendslop is about promoting trend chasers.
I mean, they KNOW their audience, streamers and their audiences, so really it's 'meh'. It's like those farming games on mobile, they know their audience and also know that if they try to wokify it, they'll lose audience since people ONLY want basic mechanics from it, not a lecture.
They will toe the line until they get popular enough that Blackrock offers them that ESG payout, then nothing matters. The CEO gets his sweet bonus check and everyone else loses. The employees get to find new jobs after their studio inadvertently tanks, gamers get to continue spending hours doomscrolling the steam store, and society just keeps heading on the Weimar trajectory.
ESG is over as Blackrock CEO himself says they quit funding it as it produced no returns for investors.
I think the most you'll get nowadays is nepobabies making games like mixtape because we hit critical mass and normies reject it themselves. Just look at Ubisoft.
Now they'll fund BRIDGES instead. (Guess what the E, S, and G stand for in it.)
So, they're just in it for the love of the game at this point? Pun intended.
They're usually fairly cheap, and they last a few months of entertainment. For that reason, they're not all objectively terrible.
But some of them are pretty thin on gameplay and rely on the 'wow so wacky' formula of friends just messing with each other a little too much.
It is what it is. Games to watch other people play.
I enjoy playing them with my kids.
I'd have to agree with you. I have two buddies, and we've dabbled with a few of these, but we never have much fun due to them typically having no depth, which are the ones I'd classify as "friend slop." We're lucky if we tolerate them for an evening.
Yet, we played Elden Ring on 3 players with the co-op mod, from start to finish, over the course of a month in our free time.
How solid is the coop mod these days?
I've also done Seamless Coop for Elden Ring and Dark Souls 1. No problem setting them up or getting them running. They're not (usually) unstable. No real lag (though we're all within a couple miles). Just a few weird hitches involving NPC dialogue, and the balance is questionable no matter what settings you use.
Desyncs are a real fucking bitch, however. In Elden Ring, desyncs will just cause you to crash pretty much any time the world updates. We got a desync because I unlocked a grace when one of the players wasn't connected, and she apparently didn't get the update when she rejoined, so we had to have her go through everything we had done step by step while she wasn't connected. However, this is probably preferable, because at least you know what went wrong.
In Dark Souls 1, the desyncs kneecapped the game, and I could not tell you why it happened. Even though we were able to get through the game, most NPCs post-Gargoyles either disappeared, looped their death animation, or didn't respect quest flags. We lost all access to pyromancy as a result. More importantly, Ingward despawned without dropping the Key to the Seal, so I had to use Cheat Engine to move myself past the door, and Dusk was completely broken, so again, I had to use Cheat Engine just to access the DLC.
We played it around 6 months ago. I can't remember more than 1-2 issues in 90 hours. We made sure to stay in the same area though. I'd read that spreading out too much causes more issues.
Desyncs were rare. Only issue the mod really seems to have is with NPCs. Some of them need to be X at Y. Each player generally needed to make sure they exhausted all dialogue to keep things rolling. Otherwise, one would have an NPC in the keep, while the other needed that NPC and he wasn't there in his keep, and we'd have to track him down.
Other than the NPC issue, which usually resolved itself due to how NPCs move as the game went on, it was pretty smooth sailing.
Oh, and as Sturm mentioned, the bonfires shouldn't be lit while people are massively spread. I don't know if this matters, but I'll add it because it could. We all have high to very high end systems, so lower end ones may have issues we didn't experience.
Streamerbait. They're... I'll say ok to watch, but they just don't have lasting appeal, IMO, particularly to play long term.
You need a good streamer who can either carry chatter on with the chat or a group of other players who all play off each other pretty well.
You said it yourself:
It's enjoyable watching the people, not necessarily the game.
See also: : No one talks about Amogus anymore. Remember that game? It's sitting at under 2,000 average Twitch viewers these days.
https://www.twitchmetrics.net/g/510218-among-us
It sits at #106 for streamer hours.
https://www.twitchmetrics.net/games/viewership?page=3
“friend slop” are multiplayer games? I love those kinds of games for traveling etc.
Played a few of them, never felt good about paying for essentially 5 minutes of entertainment in 15 hours of gameplay before everyone forgets it and moves on.
I've played friendslop with friends. Mostly Peak, and tried RVty. RV was not very good, it was buggy. Peak was great, every time. Good for teamwork, creates funny situations, and is challenging to beat, taking a reasonable amount of time [2h to peak, usually]. I don't think it's particularily fun to watch, but participating is fun. These are games to be played with your friends. Peak is collaborative. It rewards collaboration and leadership. Some of the other games have being a snitch or a traitor built into them, that's more of a werewolf style of game that i don't like anymore. Just like everything else, beware what mindset is being pushed onto you.
Some are made by legitimate developers intent on making something interesting and with substance, but a lot of them are cheap cash grabs or games for milking customers with trickling content updates.
I felt moderately more positive with REPO and Peak than I did with a lot of previous iterations like Lethal Company and Among Us. And Among Us pales in comparison to Unfortunate Spacemen imo (made by the same studio that made Abiotic).
The main reason I ever get dragged into the games in the first place is because of other friends who see the low price tag as easier and more approachable, even though I usually find the entire genre of games pretty bland, with a few exceptions that took a little longer to annoy me.
They feel like the equivalent of pulp media from generations past. Low quality stuff that's generally enjoyable but not something you'll invest much time or effort into before moving on. Many of them are free to play in order to lower the barrier to entry, which makes it pretty easy to grab your friends and just jump in for a night or two before moving on. There's really only so much you can realistically get out of something like Supermarket Together before the novelty wears off and many of these games can't sustain themselves beyond that novelty.
Maybe that's what it is, just a byproduct of our ever dwindling attention spans. We constantly crave novelty and these games provide just enough of it to sustain that habit.
I'm not terribly well attuned to the genre but my suspicion is that many of them are comparably lower effort to produce than other genres, which plays into my modern pulp media theory. Like really, just how many man hours do we think went into creating Cheese Rolling vs any given indie platformer?
Normie-bait
Is the word slop as a catchall for “thing I don’t like” gonna be on its way out soon? Please?
I think it's come to mean 'mass produced copies of something chasing a trend'. XYZ proved popular, so here's ten more quickly thrown together versions of it from people hoping to make a buck before the popularity dies.
OP may be using it too generically. It's supposed to refer to games made with low-effort, knowing that by forcing you to play with friends, you'll likely still have a positive experience and project it onto the game.
I wouldn't call something like Overcooked friendslop. It leans on friends and the interactions but has polish and deliberate design. "Quirky-task-UE-one-afternoon-effort-physics-set-to-11-lol-so-randum-xD-simulator," would be friendslop.
Yeah, that’s what it was supposed to mean, basically just a faster way to say shovelware.
I've only played Lethal Company out of those but just barely. I'd like it but I don't do a ton of friend gaming anymore and the friend is too easily bored by that sort of slop. Among Us seems way, way too social and would require a big group, and I don't even know the others. I've played some Forza Horizon games and Outlast Trials as "friend slop" basically. Some couch-co-op games with my nephews.
I don't mind them, but they are very situational for me. I don't watch streamers though, zero. I don't know that I've watched 30mins of streaming games combined in my life if you're excluding footage in review videos. If I had to name one it would be something like Max Verstappen, because I think he at least did stream in the past, but that's not exactly what he's known for.
Outlast Trials at least takes it self seriously as an actual game. I'd put it more closely in the same category of game as Dead by Daylight. Both games do unfortunately tend to revolve around fairly simple formulas with occasional modifiers/mutators tacked on.
Yeah I’d actually go as far to say it’s a good game. We got a lot out of it for not a huge price and I don’t recall being beaten down with DLC begging either. Haven’t played it in a bit. I like it significantly better than Dead By Daylight which is really only fun with a full group of friends.
Very much agreed. And Outlast Trials gives players a little more semblance of control over how they play than DBD does. Like being able to chuck bottles and bricks at enemies. DBD feels like an overdressed run of the mill ratmaze sometimes.
They're a lot of fun
I hate that every time I relented and bought one of these damn things my friends pestered me to play with them, they'd lose soon lose interest and start pestering me to buy another.
I like the fact that friend slops usually have the simplest character design, they cannot put overt political messaging in them.
And you can at least play some games alone by yourself and I find them to be better than award bait games like expedition 33, baldur's gate 3, mixtape and disco elysium, you know usual agitprop slop. The only thing I wish is we don't get so saturated with it. I think really it's the state of the western game industry. Once one dev makes a hugely successful game in certain genre, all of them want to make the same thing. It happened with survival type, roguelike deckbuilder type, farming sim type, quirky rpg type.
Never heard of these
Haven't played any of those Fall Guys was probably considered a friendslop game I'm surprised how long it lasted I didn't really care for it was too chaotic to enjoy
They’re usually not my thing, but I like the concept. Of all the different types of games out there they are far from the worst. Plus like you said they’re pretty cheap so I’m not going to get upset if the game I paid $10 for is only fun for 10 hours.
I liked Among Us, other than that I really never touched anything else.
Among Us had a nice gimmick and a decent detective element, which is what made it fun imo. Games like lethal company attempt to recreate it but just rely solely on player reaction rather than genuine challenge.