If there's a single throughline for the PC gaming year that was 2025, it's finally accepting that the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn't make sense anymore.
Tech has hit a hard graphics plateau: raw generational updates are now nuanced upgrades measured in single-digit frame gains rather than evolutions anyone with eyes can appreciate, and the subsequent pivot to AI-generated frames and experimental hair follicles aren't really revving anyone's engines when those upgrades cost a month's rent. Even if the latest hardware really was all that, the precarious AI bubble is locking normal humans out of it anyway.
It's good timing, then, that cutting edge graphics are increasingly irrelevant to keeping up with the hobby. A bright spot of 2025 was the continued rise of "friendslop," a cringey internet-spawned label for a broad genre of cooperative games designed for groups of friends.
Though it looks like it's sticking, friendslop is a terrible name for these games, because it (perhaps unintentionally) lumps them in with a growing pile of low-effort games cranked out by anonymous Steam grifters every day, and of course, actual AI slop. The well-intentioned use of "slop" probably refers to the subgenre's deliberate use of janky physics and ragdolls to conjure comedy. In REPO, navigating a valuable and fragile vase down narrow hallways is uncomfortable, awkward, and intense—much like actually moving a cherished piece of furniture from one house to another.
But there's nothing sloppy about games with a simple premise, instantly learnable controls, and crucially, with an art direction that accommodates whatever hardware you have to play them on. To have all of that at once and still end up with a fun game is anything but low-effort.
Well it's basically gaming fastfood: they're bad games in themselves, and you can only enjoy them with friends. You wouldn't enjoy them with people you don't have chemistry with. Whereas there's some competitive games like CS2 you can enjoy with random strangers because it's a mechanically well made game.
That's not to say friendslop don't have a right to exist. There's a time and a place for friendslop, it's not when you want to play a good game.
I often compare it to mediocre or bad movies which only work on cinema screens or home theater. If you watch "popcorn movies" without popcorn, you won't enjoy the movie.
I very much disagree, it's like judging that samba is not good cos it's not blues. They're two different genres with different goals. If it's fun then it is well designed.
Funny, that was actually my point I tried to make. I repeat myself:
But that's where I'd disagree:
You can have fun with badly designed or badly polished games. It needs an engaging game loop, sure, it can't be complete crap. But I'd argue that you don't need to create a good game to create a fun(ny) game.
Example: EYE Divine Cybermancy. One of my favourite games but I often laugh at the jank and incoherent story, and the bugs, and I'm still having fun.
Maybe we shouldn't call it friendslop, but friendjank?
Just want to drill into this real quick: a game like CS2 is a good game because it's enjoyable to play with strangers, but a game like Peak is a bad game because it isn't as enjoyable with strangers?
Alternatively, a game like CS2 is a good game because it's mechanically well made, but what is it about the mechanics in Peak that make it a bad game?
Take care to not conflate a personal dislike of the genre with objective quality within a context. Liking action movies doesn't mean rom coms are all terrible (no matter how much one might think they could be improved by a sudden firefight at the climax).
I didn't compare CS2 to Peak specifically. I compared good games to friendslop.
Can you tell me why you're upset that I call "friendslop" bad games? I didn't say you can't enjoy bad games, I'd say in many instances I had more fun in objectively bad games and movies with friends than I had in good games. Sometimes the good games are boring and the jank makes "bad" games great or funny.
I also didn't say I dislike friendslop. I enjoyed Lethal Company and Among Us with friends, for example. I also really like watching "bad" movies with friends, we even watched The Room once 😅
I even watch objectively bad films by myself. One of my favourites is Fortress (1992). This has an 38% rotten and a 40% popcorn meter rating on Rottentomatoes. Which is basically my point – media doesn't have to be good to be enjoyable or funny.
I'm not always after a laugh though. There's a place and a time for friendslop, and it's specifically called friendslop because of that. Don't see it as an insult.
I'm not so much upset as I am curious why one might label friendslop as exclusively bad games. Peak was used for comparison simply because it's a good game in the friendslop genre, in the same vein as CS2 being a good game in the competitive shooter genre. The comparison was being made to point out that direct comparison is futile; one game lacking something the other has doesn't make either better or worse than the other because they're in completely different contexts.
It's part of why I'm growing to loathe friendslop as the name for the genre. As much as people try to insist it isn't an insult, the connotation is that a friendslop game can't be a good game. To which I say, why not?