Source: https://www.gamespot.com
In An Unaffordable World, The Future Is Friendslop
Gaming has never been more expensive. We're here to investigate why, and help you play more while spending less. Welcome to GameSpot Cheap Week . You don't need me to tell you things are getting more expensive. Unless you're incredibly wealthy, you're already feeling the pinch. The world is less affordable, from groceries to gas to rent to, yeah, even video games. For the first time, consoles aren't getting cheaper over a generation: They're skyrocketing in price . While the price of games themselves stagnated for a long time, they're now moving rather quickly, with $70 and even $80 games becoming the new normal, and that's before you launch the games to find season passes, cosmetics shops, and other add-ons meant to entice you to spend further. There are a lot of reasons this is happening , but if you add it all up, it's simply more expensive to play games right now. But in one corner of the gaming landscape, a certain trend feels future-proofed for our unaffordable world. Friendslop, the sometimes-derogatory, sometimes-favorable term for a particular type of co-op game, is still rising in popularity since the pandemic. Games such as Lethal Company , Among Us , and Peak have dominated social media over the last half-decade, and they're inspiring a wave of games like them that are broadly approachable, relatively affordable, and highly social. For GameSpot's Cheap Week , I spoke to a handful of teams making games that one could call friendslop, to find out how studios are viewing the opportunity--and sometimes unseen obstacles--of creating social games for players on a budget. Among other qualifying traits, it's their price that's defining what this genre is even becoming. Friendslop games ought to be priced in the"impulse range," RetroStyle Games, the team behind the REPO-inspired (and butt-obsessed) Last Pirates: Die Together , told me via email. The impulse range speaks to comments made by Peak co-creator Nick Kaman, who believes that, psychologically, a game priced at $8 is still $5, but at $10 people start to question whether they ought to buy it. Many friendslop games are priced to match this thinking, and it's part of what's helped the genre grow so rapidly."[Kaman] is right," RetroStyle said,"and in co-op, it's even stronger, because nobody does that math alone. Four copies for less than one AAA deluxe skin feels like a joke you can afford. Under $10, the purchase is an impulse; over $10, the group chat starts scheduling a discussion. I think we’ve all been there, where you just gift whole four-packs just to end the debate. That's the zone this genre lives in." The same rationale is on the minds of the developers at Hexateam for Exorcist Hotline , a co-op game that combines Phasmophobia-like ghost-hunting with friendslop elements. Bandit Trap Lethal Company Headliners"It’s become clear that players don’t treat prices below $10 as investments that need to pay off, but rather as cheap entertainment," the studio said in an email."In a market where having multiple players is key, making it easy to convince friends to buy the game you like is key. And when your game costs less than a night in a pub, it becomes easier." One reason friendslop games can be sold for cheap is that they're often mechanically simple. Games like REPO and Headliners have outsold major releases we heard about for years while they were in production, and those friendslop frontrunners did it with little to no pre-release marketing and with just a fraction of the time and money spent to get them to the finish line. While AAA game budgets and schedules balloon beyond comprehension, it's often a friendslop game's simplicity that carries it to such enormously successful heights, which feel even greater when you didn't need to sell a AAA-level number of copies for the project to make financial sense."The Peak lifting-people-up mechanic is so fucking genius. That makes the game," Lazy River 's Mike Boxleiter told me over a Zoom call."You can bounce your friends, and you can throw them stuff, I guess. And outside of that, it's just the mechanic of lifting people up. Like that's the shoot-dodge from Max Payne: the thing that you do over and over again that makes the experience sing for whatever reason." The more I spoke to teams in this realm, the clearer it became how they all look up to Peak as, though not the genre's progenitor, perhaps its greatest success story so far."[Peak co-developers] Aggrocrab and the Landfall roster understand better than almost anyone that a simple, fun concept can be more important than any other factor," the team behind the demonic cooking sim Happy's Humble Burger Cult told me. Boxleiter said his team is intentionally seeking a deeper experience for Lazy River, a game about building a defensible raft and fighting off zombified patrons with pool noodles to survive in a water park, but he admits, if you're seeking a more mainstream audience, Peak's way of leaving no players behind due to skill level is key. Players understand the setup right away, and as they're met with more friction over time, it's not due to mechanical complexity or scope. Often, it's due to your friend nudging you off a mountain because they thought it'd be funny."I think with friendslop, it's all about being able to touch each other and fuck with each other or help each other in physical ways," Boxleiter told me. It's true; physics-based mishaps are nearly definitional at this stage in the genre's lifespan, with more examples coming out all the time, such as the upcoming game from Dwarven Brothers, We Are So Cooked , in which players must work together to dispose of a dead body without getting caught, or Koro Games' Friendly Steps , in which players try to stumble home after a night of heavy drinking. It's in these mechanics where some unpredictability--some jank--is a feature, not a bug. And as it's so welcome in this space, the time to polish a game can be reduced. You don't have to nail the physics of carrying a corpse through a crowded hotel or picking up your piss-drunk pal from the pavement. Players want it to be messy, because messy is funny. All of these components help future-proof the genre for our ongoing affordability crisis. Developers enjoy shortened timelines and less overhead, and can ultimately sell their highly social, often laugh-out-loud funny games for cheaper, because you're likely selling them in groups at a time. When done well, you're giving players memorable nights with their pals from the comfort of their homes in a world that feels like it costs $100 just to walk out your front door sometimes. Friendly Steps We Are So Cooked Lazy River And because of the viral nature of these games, it's not only more realistic to think you might recoup what you spend on making a game; the biggest winners wind up being massive and open up new avenues for their creators, like how Innersloth's enormous success with Among Us led to Outersloth, its burgeoning publishing label. But for all the key components that make friendslop the wave of the future, there's one aspect that's maybe less cited but will become even more relevant in years to come: hardware specs. With the intentional jank and limited mechanics often comes a stylized, usually cartoonish look and simplified art direction to friendslop games. This tends to mean a game isn't so demanding on your hardware because it's not full of high-end, photorealistic visuals, which is well-timed, since few players can afford new, more powerful devices right now. Many players will be priced out of upgrading their PCs for a while. I've wondered if manufacturers of the next generation of consoles are either quietly delaying their creations to a possibly cheaper future, or racing them out sooner to avoid needing to increase their prices even more . The longer we get into the affordability crisis, the more I expect lower-spec machines like the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch to become developers' target specs. People who own them may be more mindful of playing games that run on their lower-spec devices--or, as the We Are So Cooked team comically put it, on"non-NASA-supplied hardware." In turn, devs will need to plan for those platforms ahead of time, not try to make them run well on those platforms later. Essentially, low-spec machines may become the primary target, not the afterthought where a team then makes technical concessions other platforms didn't require. But friendslop games don't ask much of your platform. They're lower-spec by design, and so just as they appeal to players of all skill levels, are extremely affordable, and work wonders as memory-making machines for you and your buddies, they're also more broadly playable. The lowest-spec player in your group isn't left behind. Grain Rot Last Pirates: Die Together Happy's Humble Burger Cult"If you want your game to be accessible, you have to be realistic and look at the hardware people are actually playing on," Beck and Branch Games, the team behind the highly wishlisted and newly released Grain Rot , told me."On consoles, this has always been straightforward because you know the exact specs everyone is using. On PC, the best resource is the Steam Hardware Survey. By analyzing that data alongside the game we want to make, it’s all about finding a balance between fidelity and system requirements." Picomy co-founder and creative director Michael Balm explained how his team approached this problem for Bandit Trap , a 3v1 PvP game with friendslop leanings that basically plays like the movie Home Alone."Because we started as a mobile-game developer, we still carry that mindset of being careful with performance and avoiding overly demanding technology. We do think it's important to make games that are accessible to as many players as possible, especially as people keep their hardware for longer." Still, friendslop isn't just the trend today because those games are cheap fun and they run on potatoes. As Koro Games' Vlad Koro put it, they're a response to something else, too."In our team discussions, we realized that these games serve another crucial purpose: They are a shelter from modern 'tryhard' live-service titles," Koro said."Players are exhausted from competitive, stressful, high-stakes games where a single mistake leads to toxic teammates yelling at you. Modern gamers need a place to just hang out with friends without the extra anxiety, to laugh at funny physics, and to unwind after a hard day." In Koro's eyes, games like his and others in this realm are not only a reaction to poor affordability, but also"loneliness and burnout." Like any trend in gaming, the supply runs the risk of outpacing the demand. There are so many friendslop games now that the teams I spoke to for this story, plus the several hugely successful games I mentioned throughout, are merely a small fraction of the many friendslop games that have released or are in production. As I was writing this feature, I have had two more examples hit my inbox today alone, and though Steam doesn't (yet) have a friendslop label, you can see dozens of them are on the way with just a few minutes of browsing. Peak found enormous success, but replicating that requires a lot more than a similar look and feel. While players are drawn to the genre because its games are cheap, disposable fun, developers know the stakes are different for them."Survivorship bias makes people think all kinds of new trends are 'life hacks' or easy money--this is simply not true," Hexateam told me."For every successful friendslop game that earns millions, there are 10 friendslop games that no one has ever heard about." As the Dwarven Brothers put it, when it comes to game design, there's a moment and then there's a loop , and understanding the difference so you can create the latter can be a challenge."It's easy to make something chaotic once," the team said."It's much harder to make that chaos readable, replayable, and consistently funny without becoming repetitive or frustrating." Boxleiter said the current friendslop trend is reminiscent of the early"gold rush" on iOS."Anytime you have a new format pop up, and a lot of games come out quickly that do really well, [people think] there was an underserved niche," he said."But once you start getting it more mature, you're going to have a lot of people who are chasing that niche and aren't hitting quality targets or not making something interesting enough. [...] There's going to be some heartbreak for teams who thought that it was going to be an easy route to success. I've been there before." For more on my talk with studios working in the"friendslop" world, read what they think of the questionable genre label itself .
