What is friendslop, and why are these cheap co-op games so big?

The short version

• What’s happening: Friendslop is a jokey and sometimes barbed slang word for low-priced online co-op games built around messing about with friends. It isn't an official genre, and it has no fixed definition.
• Why now: Its use for co-op games began as a joke on X in March 2025 and spread after PEAK launched that June. Views of its Wikipedia page peaked in summer 2026, while new games keep arriving.
• Should you care: If you're choosing a game for a group, the label tells you little about any one title. Price varies by country, and four copies add up faster than one price suggests.

Friendslop is a jokey, sometimes barbed name for low-priced online co-op games where most of the fun comes from messing about with friends. It isn’t an official genre. Players, critics and developers all use it differently, and not all of them like it.

People disagree on what counts, so this piece reports the argument without ruling on any game. It also looks at the part that may outlast the word: one small purchase can pull in a whole friend group.

A quick check before you buy one of these games:

• Have you got two or three people who’d play at the same time? AppMagic, a games data firm, says “almost no one” buys them to play alone.
• Would a few good evenings feel like enough? Many players don’t stay long, as the figures below show.
• What’s the price in your country? It can differ a lot, so check your own store.

Why is it called friendslop?

It started as a joke. Know Your Meme dates its use for games to 17 March 2025, when an X user posted the covers of Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. and Content Warning under that name, then said in a follow-up that it wasn’t meant seriously. Know Your Meme’s separate entry notes an earlier, unrelated joke about anime in November 2024.

The stated test was that such a game’s purpose is “friendfarming”. The “slop” half supplies the sting, because it suggests something careless. That’s the only link with AI slop: friendslop says nothing about whether AI was used.

The post was initially met with mockery, Know Your Meme says. Then PEAK arrived on Steam on 16 June 2025, and Aftermath’s account describes games media linking it with the word, which became a catch-all for co-op indie games.

How it spread

1. 17 Mar 2025An X post labels Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. and Content Warning “friendslop”, according to Know Your Meme. A follow-up calls it a joke.
2. 16 Jun 2025PEAK launches on Steam. Games media soon connects it with the word, which widens to cover co-op indie games more generally.
3. 26 Dec 2025Dexerto reports an investor's LinkedIn call to drop the term as it appears more often in pitch decks.
4. 6 Mar 2026Data firm AppMagic publishes sales and retention figures for games it calls friendslop.
5. 18 Aug 2026Kotaku publishes an interview in which a House House developer calls it a “bad word”.

What is friendslop, and which games get the label?

There’s no strict definition, as Know Your Meme said in April 2025. Its readings ran from any co-op game at all to the one it considered most popular at the time: co-op horror where players enter dangerous places, grab resources and try to escape. A climbing game like PEAK doesn’t fit that, which shows how far the meaning has stretched.

Later descriptions tend to share a few traits:

• A low price. AppMagic puts most of them at $5 to $20.
• A small group. Four players is the usual picture, in AppMagic’s account.
• Proximity voice chat. Voices fade as players move apart in the game. Both AppMagic and PC Gamer single it out.
• Mistakes as the joke. Aggro Crab’s art director Galen Drew told Game Developer the fun “comes from stupid stuff you and your friends do”.

Here’s who has applied the word to what. A title in this table means that source used the label. It isn’t our opinion of the game.

The edges are blurry. AppMagic says Phasmophobia is “still not a friendslop, but close enough”, while Know Your Meme’s broadest reading would sweep in Minecraft and Mario Party.

Descriptions of the type mention low budgets too, but published figures are scarce. The one we found is for PEAK: Aggro Crab’s Nick Kaman estimated to Game Developer in June 2025 that the two studios spent under $200,000. That’s one studio head’s estimate for one game, so it says nothing about the rest.

Is friendslop an insult?

Sometimes, depending on who’s speaking and about what. The people who’ve argued about it in public fall into roughly five camps.

“Drop the word.” Investor Binni Erlingsson of Behold Ventures made this case on LinkedIn, Dexerto reported in December 2025. “‘Slop’ to me means that something is sloppy, not well done and a bit junky,” he wrote.

“The genre’s fine, the name isn’t.” Stuart Gillespie-Cook of House House told Kotaku in August 2026 that it’s a “bad word”, with “connotations of carelessness, which I don’t think any of those games are made with”. He still saw the use of a single term for the group.

“It’s too broad.” Bee Wertheimer argued in The A.V. Club in July 2025 that the tag lands on small co-op games “regardless of quality or resemblance”.

“We’ll wear it.” Kaman told Inverse in June 2025: “we wear the term as a badge of honor.” In May 2026, he told PC Gamer: “It’s technically derogatory. But why not lean into that?”

“It’s only a description now, or it was never sincere.” SUPERJUMP wrote in March 2026 that the word “no longer refers to games in that genre in a derogatory manner”. Aftermath’s Jay Castello went further in 2025, arguing the term, “said genuinely, had never actually existed at all”.

If you’re talking to a developer or a fan and aren’t sure how it’ll land, say “co-op game”. Set the argument aside and the word points at one idea: the main feature is who you’re playing with.

Why is friendslop so popular?

Three explanations come up with named sources behind them, though none of them is proof.

The purchase spreads. One person’s interest tends to become a group purchase, because the game needs the others. AppMagic estimates that four copies push a group’s spend to $20 to $80.

Clips do the advertising. Know Your Meme credits viral clips on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube with bringing people in. A pratfall is funny to strangers too, which suits a format built on things going wrong.

The mood shifted towards hanging out. Kaman told PC Gamer the change “probably started with COVID”, when people wanted a way to socialise through games. Inverse also links the trend to a wider appetite for connection, and describes the games as “unserious and definitely not competitive”.

How much do friendslop games cost where you live?

Steam sets prices by region, so a single dollar figure can mislead. These are standard list prices, before any sale, when we checked on 6 November 2026, and they can change at any time. Steam’s Pakistan store quotes US dollars, and tax and exchange rates mean the columns aren’t like for like.

Our own sums, assuming four people each pay the full listed price in the same country: PEAK comes to $31.96 in the US, £25.56 in the UK and $15.96 in Pakistan.

Steam’s refund policy covers games within two weeks of purchase and with under two hours played, so try it together early and check the conditions.

How much money do these games make?

A lot, on third-party figures. AppMagic’s numbers aren’t company accounts, and it published them on 6 March 2026, so they’ve aged since. We treat them as estimates, and the page doesn’t say what comes off the revenue totals, so don’t read them as what a studio banked.

AppMagic mixes “downloads” and “copies sold”, so don’t compare these rows too closely.

The surprise is how quickly players leave, given sales this large. AppMagic puts average 30-day retention, the share of players still around after a month, at about 3% for games it labels this way, and says that’s “completely fine” for the format.

Phasmophobia and Dead by Daylight are AppMagic’s comparison games, and it doesn’t label them friendslop. Its Content Warning figures cover the year before it published, and it notes the game spread partly through free access, which may affect them.

Low retention doesn’t tell you whether a game is any good: a board game that comes out twice a year would score badly too. It’s closer to a party than a hobby.

Is friendslop dying?

Nobody knows, and the two obvious measures cover different periods. Curiosity about the word has fallen since August. Monthly views of its English Wikipedia page reached 36,209 in August 2026, then dropped to 12,997 in October 2026, close to their level in spring 2026.

That’s down about 64% from the peak by our sums, though it’s a measure of people looking up a word, not of anyone playing. Player numbers were still climbing up to the middle of this year. How To Market A Game, a site for indie developers, tracked 16 co-op party games and reported about 197,000 players at once in Lethal Company in December 2023, then combined totals of about 281,000 in March 2025 and 350,000 by its July 2026 post. The first figure is one game and the others are totals, so the rise isn’t like for like.

Its author also says top titles grab more than half of that audience, then fade to about 10% within three to nine months. So individual games falling away doesn’t tell you the type is ending.

Kaman told PC Gamer in May 2026 that he thinks there’s “a lot of design space” left. The word itself could still go the way of most internet slang.

The group chat asking who’s free tonight won’t.

Our take

The word is doing two jobs at once: naming a format and passing judgement on it. Only the first is any use to someone choosing what to play, so we'd keep the description and judge each game separately. The lasting idea here is commercial, a price low enough for a whole group to say yes together.

Common questions

Is friendslop a bad term?

It depends who's using it. A House House developer and an investor have objected to the “slop” part, while PEAK's Nick Kaman has said his team wears it as a badge of honour. If you're unsure, “co-op game” offends nobody.

Is friendslop a real genre?

Not officially. AppMagic calls it slang and says it isn't an official genre. People use it as a loose label for low-priced social co-op games, and it has no agreed boundary.

What was the first friendslop game?

There's no agreed answer. The word's use for co-op games dates from March 2025, according to Know Your Meme. Inverse calls Among Us the genre's “granddaddy”, AppMagic credits Lethal Company with starting the recent wave, and Know Your Meme floats Left 4 Dead and Deep Rock Galactic under one narrow definition.

Is friendslop only horror games?

No, although it started out that way. In April 2025, Know Your Meme's most popular reading was co-op horror. Later use takes in games such as PEAK, a co-op climbing game.

Is friendslop dying?

Nobody knows. As of November 2026, views of the word's Wikipedia page are well below their August peak, but that measures curiosity about a word. New games have kept arriving, and short player lifespans have been normal for these titles throughout.

Sources

1. Know Your Meme: Friendslop
2. Know Your Meme: What's The Term For Games Like 'Lethal Company' and 'R.E.P.O.'? People Calling Co-Op Games 'Friendslop' Explained
3. AppMagic: Friendslop Happened: Why Clumsy Co-Op Games Took Over Steam in 2025
4. Aftermath: 'Friendslop' Isn't Real, But People Love Posting About It Anyway
5. Inverse: Friendslop Is The Biggest Gaming Trend in 2025 — And It's Just Getting Started
6. Inverse: Co-op Hit Peak Shows Games About Goofing Around With Friends Are Anything But “Slop”
7. PC Gamer: Peak boss doesn't mind us calling it friendslop: 'Why not make a game where the point is to hang out with your friends?'
8. Kotaku: The Creators Of Big Walk Break Down The GOTY Contender's Development, Puzzles, And Stunning Ending
9. Dexerto: Games investor lobbies to “kill friendslop” as it devalues games like Peak and REPO
10. The A.V. Club: Not Every Co-Op Game is “Friendslop”
11. SUPERJUMP: The Loneliness of Friendslop
12. Destructoid: This indie game that combined friendslop with gambling just sold over a million copies
13. Game Developer: How co-op climbing hit Peak achieved 2 million sales for less than $200,000
14. Game Developer: What developers can learn from the indie social co-op games topping the Steam charts
15. How To Market A Game: Is Friendslop saturated?
16. Wikimedia: monthly pageviews for the English Wikipedia article Friendslop
17. Steam: PEAK on Steam
18. Steam: Lethal Company on Steam
19. Steam: R.E.P.O. on Steam
20. Steam Support: Steam Refunds

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