Friendslop

Friendslop is this amazing genre of game where you pay $10 to play a silly co-op concept with your friends.   There's Schedule 1, Peak, REPO, Lethal Company, etc., etc., etc.  These are fantastic and make up a large % of the weekly gaming I do.

This genre gets more and more saturated every day, but for some reason it still feels like a massive growth lever for gaming to me.  I'm always eager to try out a new friendslop game, and I feel like there's still tons of space in my life for much more of them.  I've never played Roblox, but I imagine it's basically these style of games but community developed?  There is probably a huge market for games that are:

• cheap (<$10)
• adult-oriented (so not Roblox)
• online multiplayer (of course with proximity voice chat)
• extremely easy to play (no tutorial required)
• shallow or gimmicky (players can just jump in and play)

So the idea would be you come up with a core gimmick (climbing a mountain, selling drugs) and build a sandbox around that gimmick that you and your friends can have fun in.

Movie tickets are more than $10 at this point, so getting a even a few hours of fun from a $10 game is well worth it to me.  From my perspective, this seems like a much more sustainable model of game development - faster dev cycles, shorter time commitment from players.  As I've gotten older, I really do value less content in games - I want cheap games that I can try a lot of!  A 2-3 hour adventure feels a lot less daunting to start over a 40 hour JRPG.

Now, the ideal game I'd love to develop is not friendslop unfortunately, but as I think more and more about trying my hand at game development, I more and more think my first game should be something like that.