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'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.