Last week, we talked about the abundance of business stories available to cover in the independent video game industry. Today, we want to dive a little bit deeper into a specific genre of independent game that has emerged and is rising quickly in popularity – and profitability: Friendslop.
Less slop, more friends
If you frequent social media and have recently seen clips of people painting blobby doll-like avatars into the background (with varying degrees of skill), then you may already be familiar with the friendslop phenomenon. While normally the word “slop” has a negative connotation, in this case the term is used affectionately to refer to a subgenre of cooperative video game, which is defined by the social interaction it facilitates. The word “slop” refers not to the quality of the game but rather to its low budget, low cost to purchase (generally under $10), and low barrier to play – users can play on devices they already have, such as a computer or phone, without having to learn complicated rules – making it great for friend groups with varied levels of gaming experience to all play together.
While the term “friendslop” didn’t appear on social media until 2024 in reference to anime, and then specifically used to reference this gaming genre in March 2025, these types of games had already exploded in popularity years prior, thanks in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first such game, Among Us, was released in 2018, but didn’t initially gain much traction. In fact, in its first year it peaked at 1800 concurrent players. But, in August 2020, as people were looking for ways to remotely connect with friends during quarantine, streamers discovered the game’s potential. By September, 60 million players were active on the game daily, and since then, the game has been downloaded over 650 million times.
A profitable trend emerges
The friendslop trend was only just beginning. Even as quarantine ended, new games have emerged in the same niche and found huge success. There was Lethal Company in 2023, which was estimated to have quickly sold 10 million copies at $10 a piece, PEAK in summer 2025, which sold 3 million copies in its first two weeks, and now Meccha Chameleon (the aforementioned hide-and-seek game), released in June 2026, is already raking in millions for its two creators.
In part, the popularity of these games is fueled by their virality: streamers and gamers post clips of their wacky in-game shenanigans with their friends, generating more popularity and more streamers posting content, all encouraging audiences to pick up the game as well. This means that the developers have to do very little to market their own game, as social media does the work for them. The creators of Meccha Chameleon said they didn’t spend “a single yen” on advertising, and still sold over 7 million copies in two weeks of its release. Not bad for a game that took the creators only two months to create.
Virality and retention
While a quickly made game doesn’t necessarily result in a low-quality product (after all, while the creators of Meccha Chameleon only took two months to create the game, they used features they had already created for other games and leveraged years of experience in the field to create something new), some critics argue that the friendslop trend is encouraging some to focus on the quick cash grab rather than the love of the game.
However, developers looking to capitalize on the trend should be careful not to misunderstand what friendslop is all about: gamers don’t want a sloppy product, they want a simple, silly premise that is executed well enough to be fun to play with friends. The product has to actually work, or it won’t get picked up, and even then it’s impossible to predict which games will become a viral sensation. For every PEAK and Meccha Chameleon, there are many other friendslop games that won’t be catapulted to the same level of virality.
Similarly, friendslop games are not known to have high retention rates. Even though these games are often best-sellers on Steam, they also tend to have an average 3% retention rate after 30 days, as the virality and shine wear off. Thankfully, for developers, the business model is not necessarily based on having loyal users, but rather to encourage entire friend groups to buy the same game, play for a few weeks, then move on to the next friendslop creation.
