Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000126 · Gaming → Mobile games → Viral hits and collapses · 2018-2025
Friendslop
Slang for cheap co-op games friends play together online
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“A genre name that insults the games it describes, and some of the studios now put it in their adverts.”
Why Noah said no
Friendslop is the 2025 name for cheap co-op games like Peak and Lethal Company, built for proximity chat with your mates. Among Us already covers friend groups piling into a cheap game together during lockdown, and the label is too new to know if it'll last.
- Rejected
- 27 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 14.9 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendslop
What it is
Friendslop is a term for low-cost indie games designed for friend groups to play cooperatively, with simple rules that anyone can jump into regardless of skill. Games like Among Us and Lethal Company fit the label. The word combines friend with slop as a joking insult, though some developers have embraced it. The genre took off during COVID lockdowns as a way to socialise remotely.
Why it’s internet culture
During lockdowns, people couldn't meet in person, so they played together in cheap, accessible games instead of grinding through competitive ranked systems. The term shows a shift in what gaming meant: less about individual achievement and more about shared time with people you knew, and a willingness to call something low-budget and still love it.
Players coined a half-insulting name for the cheap co-op games they loved, like Lethal Company and Peak, where the fun is shouting at friends over proximity chat. Some studios then started using the insult in their own marketing.
What Noah read
Friendslop is a slang word, used to describe a subgenre of cooperative indie games oriented around a low barrier of entry and social interaction, emphasizing gameplay in social groups. The name is a portmanteau of friend and the pejorative suffix -slop, as these social games tend to be low-budget, low-cost indie games intended to attract entire friend groups as an online social activity. The friendslop genre is purported to have originated with the 2018 social deduction video game Among Us, with the popularity of the genre skyrocketing during the COVID-19 pandemic as a means of remotely connecting with friends during the quarantine. The term "friendslop" originated from a tweet describing "friendfarming" as a contemporary trend in indie games. The popularity of the 2025 co-op survival video game Peak led to a drastic increase in use of the term amongst gaming media and players, shifting to a more descriptive usage, though it continued to be used as a derogatory term to accuse similar games of being cash-ins. Elements Common elements of friendslop games include a low entry difficulty, frequently described in relation to Bushnell's Law, that allows people of any gaming skill to part…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“Friendslop is the 2025 name for cheap co-op games like Peak and Lethal Company, built for proximity chat with your mates. Among Us already covers friend groups piling into a cheap game together during lockdown, and the label is too new to know if it'll last.”