The use of the term “slop” has recently gained popularity, along with a new negative connotation. Slop can roughly be defined as a product of low effort and quality, usually concerning something in social media. Adding the word slop to the end of an item often labels it as something that is bad, which usually isn’t the case. One of the most notable labels in the slop genre is “friendslop”.

Friendslop is a genre of games notable for relying on interaction between friends for carrying the gameplay experience. Many criticize games of this type for having boring mechanics and being low effort, but this couldn’t be more wrong. The friendslop games that have been successful have rather innovative and creative mechanics, as well as an intriguing gameplay loop.

The first of many friendslop games to blow up was Lethal Company. Lethal Company is a 2023 game focused on collecting scrap and loot on abandoned planets with monsters within the facilities, with each item having a different value associated with it. The goal of the game is to collect enough loot to fill a quota, which increases each time until the player’s team fails. This game, while being very interactive with friends, still held a high standard: Lethal Company perfectly balances humor and horror all at once. Lethal Company made roughly 177 million dollars, even while being a ten dollar game made by a single developer.

Lethal Company’s wild success led many other developers to try to recreate its effect, with one of these games being Content Warning. The game had similar gameplay to Lethal Company, but rather than collecting loot, players would record videos and upload them to “SpookTube.” Content Warning didn’t flop, but didn’t succeed nearly as much as Lethal Company and simply failed to recreate its effect. It wasn’t just Content Warning that had failed to succeed; many other games have tried copying Lethal Company’s formula, to varying degrees of success.

While many games failed to succeed as much as Lethal Company did, there were a select few who thrived: REPO has the same gameplay loop of Lethal Company, as in collecting loot to make a quota, but this iteration of the genre included new mechanics, such as physics to all loot as well as the player. Rather than leaving it as what Lethal Company did, REPO innovated on the genre by making it so that being reckless with loot may cause them to lose some of their value. This made REPO one of the first games to innovate on Lethal Company’s formula and succeed. REPO made an estimated 145 million dollars in total and made 31 million within the first 3 weeks of its release.

While many games tried to copy Lethal Company’s gameplay loop, one game made their own: Peak. Peak’s gameplay consists of climbing a mountain while managing stats like health, hunger, weight and many more. This new twist on the “friendslop” formula made Peak take off, with many picking up the game along with viral clips spreading online. However, this had a consequence: after Peak’s success, the term “friendslop” started to rise in popularity.

With all of these games in mind, it’s clear that the term “friendslop” reduces their creative and addictive gameplay to low quality games. “Friendslop” slandered the reputation of these games and put down the effort put in to produce them. While it is true that many games copied Lethal Company’s gameplay without any new aspects and may be more low effort than other games, that still doesn’t make games of these types inherently “slop.” If a game is made in admiration of those who came before it and a passion for creation, then the labeling of “slop” is a smack in the face of that effort. “Slop“ is heavily opinionated and should not be used as a label, especially for such a loose purpose.