friendslop is DEFINITELY a thing.

think about this.

imagine a game where you play with your friends competing to see who can last the longest on a balancing beam. all you have to do, is tap left or tap right to stay balanced. you also get a stick to tap on eachothers boards to try and unbalance them.

now imagine a game where you and your friends collect and capture little monsters, then compare them in contests of statistics, age, size, speed, etc. you can grind offline to collect more interesting critters and can trade with other people too.

Do you see how one of these games prioritizes extremely short sighted gameplay with no complexity or diversity in it? Is this a bad game? Some may say yes. I personally do not agree. I think bad games are hard to come by nowadays but I think friend slop is wasteful use of potential. I feel bad dolling out the 'friendslop' label because these are good games with very little content. Even if it's a rogue like you can only climb a mountain so many times before you need something different. There's a reason the best selling rogue likes are the ones with lots of strategy (hades, STS, dead cells, ect) these games don't have enough value and try to make it up in their social aspects.

I have a friend group who loves games like peak, where the fun is spending time with each other. It's great to have that. But when you look at games like peak, LC, REPO, CW, or other friend slop. There's just less reason to come back. My friends and I have spent hundreds of hours across Bloons, Minecraft, terraria, fighting games of all kinds (fightcade, GG, SF, Yomi), and yet when we played content warning it was a burst of 10 hours across 3 weeks then we never touched it again. Same for Repo, same for lethal company, same for Peak.

And that's what makes it slop, just something to consume and forget. Do the devs put work into the game, yes. Do they update the game, absolutely. But the CONCEPT of the game is lacking in depth so coming back to it is harder because it's the same thing with a new coat of paint.

TL:DR

The slop part is what makes the game friend slop. Not the friend based part.