A brave new world of friendslop

The buzziest new game right now is Big Walk, a cooperative game from the Untitled Goose Game team about solving cartoony puzzles in natural splendor. I’ve been having a blast with it so far, especially since one of my squad is Australian and will regularly stop our Big Walk to talk about the game’s excellent recreation of the Aussie environment.

But Big Walk isn’t the biggest game of its kind right now. The game has sold a million copies across most major platforms, but on Steam its player counts, while impressive, have never even cracked the top 25 most-played games. In fact, the game is much less popular than the newest update for Peak, another cooperative outdoor game. Peak is the most enduring example of “friendslop,” a term that’s barely a year old but has permanently shifted the way we talk about video games. No one can agree whether Big Walk is friendslop or not, or if that’s good, or meaningful at all. What’s really going on here?

Let’s look at the data first. Since it released last week, Big Walk has averaged about 19,000 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamCharts, with a maximum of 46,000 players. But those numbers have already been beaten by Peak, which has an average of 35,000 players and a maximum of 122,000 in the same timeframe, thanks to this week’s “Final Ascent” update.

Those numbers don’t include console players, but there are other signs we can look at showing a similar difference. Peak is also bigger on Twitch, with 14,000 average viewers on the first full day of the update, compared to 13,000 for Big Walk on the same day.

The most obvious reason Big Walk can’t match Peak’s numbers is that Big Walk doesn’t have a single-player mode, and deliberately discourages playing with online randos or together in person. It’s going for a highly specific experience that requires a lot of scheduling with your friends. Which makes its smaller player counts look a lot more impressive, but also means it’s really hard to talk about the game without bringing up friendslop.

Over the past year, “Friendslop” has been used to refer to a class of games that emphasize collaborative multiplayer gameplay, but tend to have very simple design and cheap, basic visuals, so they’re easy for new players and fun for social interactions you can watch on streams. As I’ve tracked Steam and Twitch stats for Garbage Intelligence, I’ve seen many of these games — like Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. and Schedule 1 — have brief bursts of enormous popularity among both players and viewers before coming back down to earth. 

The 15 minutes of fame for those last two games came in March 2025, which is when an X post by user wooosaaaahhhhh coined the term friendslop. It was a joke, and its place in the vernacular is still highly ironic, but I think the term took off because it spoke to a deeper, collective confusion. How did R.E.P.O. and Peak, two games that were respectively developed without matchmaking and for a game jam, become the two best-selling Steam games of the year? How can it be happening again this year, with the even more basic Meccha Chameleon atop the charts? Why is this not just a new trend in gaming but the biggest and most important genre in the industry?

There are two forces at work here. One is, simply, death. I’ve written before about how the game industry is in the middle of an extinction-level event. Smaller and cheaper games, that have to focus more on shipping anything at all, are better suited to withstand all the developer layoffs, executive fears and hardware price hikes. But, as usual with death, the other force is rebirth.

A new generation is taking over, one with a completely different idea of what a game is. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Roblox and Garry’s Mod, and the 15th for Minecraft and Skyrim. All of these games have remained enormously successful and culturally important, on the strength of millions of separate games and mods built within them by fellow players. 

Basically every PC gamer born in the 21st century is used to these massive titles as a secondary version of Steam itself — less a game than a platform for a whole category of interactive experience. After all that time, it makes sense that it doesn’t matter how a game looks, because the idea of “a game” isn’t so singular anymore. If you grew up trying out a different Minecraft map or Roblox obby every day, were you playing the same game or not? And what difference does it make?

This isn’t completely new. The three most-played games on all of Steam — Counter-Strike 2, DOTA 2 and PUBG: Battlegrounds — all started out as mods for other games that got popular enough for standalone, official versions. Now, there’s not much distinction between the two. It’s been a long time since a game needed a physical CD release, which Sony announced last month they would be ending altogether for PlayStation games. One thing less that separates amateur game mods from the real deal. 

Versions of this “Friendslop” trend is happening throughout mass media. Less professional, internet-native art with dedicated fandoms are finally getting called up to the big leagues. We’ve covered YouTubers making movies, TikTokers being pop stars and fanfic becoming novels, and this is the same thing (should we talk about Broadway next?). Mods are occupying the same space as full, professional games now, and are being treated with the same level of respect by their players. “Friendslop” is just the first way we have to talk about it, but we’ll need more soon, because the mods are going to keep coming.

Maybe we shouldn’t say the biggest game right now is Peak or Big Walk. Maybe we should say it’s “Verity,” a Minecraft mod that adds a new enemy to the game: An all-powerful, evil smiley face named Verity, based on a popular YouTube video. Since the mod was released less than two months ago, it’s been downloaded for free over 18 million times. We can’t track player numbers or Twitch streams in the same way, but between the video and the mod, Verity has completely captured the YouTube Shorts algorithm. Verity is a new icon of brainrot, alongside the KPop Demon Hunters and another mod creation, Sprunki. We’re in a brave new world, that has such friends — slop and otherwise — in it.

While we’re contemplating the Brainrot Canon, let’s check in on Skibidi Toilet. A lot has happened to the original web series since it infected Gen Alpha back in 2023. Rolling Stone has a good overview, but the most important point is that Alexey Gerasimov, the series’ creator, sold the entire franchise to a bunch of Hollywood veterans who tried to run the series by committee. Things went about as well as you’d expect for a Skibidi Toilet oversight council, and the series has been on hold for almost a year in favor of a bunch of (mostly canceled) adaptations and spinoffs.

Until Tuesday, when the series’ official channel announced that a new episode would be released today. There’s a reason they’ve waited for so long. Fans were already in open revolt, dissolving planned collaborations and writing open letters to the new parent company. Now, they’ve finally dared to claim authorship over the original series.

But this will be the real test of the very young fandom. Skibidi Toilet racked up billions of views because it works well in an infinite scroll of YouTube Shorts, not because of any dedicated community. And now that it’s lost the artistic integrity it had in its glory days, it remains to be seen whether that community can put a dent in its view counts.

Speaking of artistic integrity! Earlier this week, video game writer Stella Sacco claimed she was fired as the lead writer of an upcoming game called Rideshare “Stimulator” (which I was surprised to learn isn’t a porn game), specifically so ChatGPT could write the game’s dialogue instead. At the time, there wasn’t any AI disclosure on the game’s Steam page, which had been public for weeks.

The game’s publisher, Saber Interactive, denied the accusations, but admitted that the game was using AI-generated dialogue. The statement concluded “None of our 3000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI”. Which pretty quickly made for a great case of shirt answering. Speaking to This Week in Videogames, Saber’s CEO said “Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her [...] I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI."

For more on how this is all going, a Twitch employee said that the site’s new Amazon AI training was turned on by default because “if it was opt in, nobody would opt in.”

For the past week or so, TikTok users have been arguing about a woman who mostly posts about going to Disneyland and other theme parks. She stands accused of the crime of “stalking Peter Pan” — which mostly seems to come from a few videos of her at the parks with the actor who plays the character. Users are now combing through those videos for evidence, analyzing body language, all the stuff the TikTok investigators have done before. 

Has it really been long enough since Couch Guy we need to go over why this is bad? Not everything people post is a clue in an ARG. TikTok shows a tiny, distorted sliver of people’s lives and experiences, one specifically meant to put your parasocial brain into overdrive. In fact, it has a lot of overlap with all the tricks they pull in the Disney parks!

P.S. here’s the Discord barreled shotgun.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***