What Is Friendslop? The Genre Your Group Chat Already Plays

Somebody in your group chat has already said it. "Peak tonight?" Or Lethal Company, or R.E.P.O., or whatever the one this month is. Four of you get on a call. The game is a bit broken and nobody is good at it, and two hours later the only thing anyone remembers is the moment one of you fell off the mountain while explaining the plan.

That is friendslop. If you came here for the games, the full list of friendslop you can play in the browser is at antics.gg/games/friendslop. If you want to know why the genre exists and where it is going, keep reading.

Where the word came from

The term is about a year and a half old. Know Your Meme traces it to a post on X in March 2025 that went roughly "I don't know how else to describe it, but I call this genre of game friendslop." It stuck because everyone already knew which games it meant: the wave of small co-op games that followed Lethal Company, then Content Warning and R.E.P.O., and in 2025 Peak.

"Slop" was a jab at games that are low budget, janky and more meme than game. The developers it was aimed at took it as a compliment. One of the Peak team told the AV Club they love the term and hate to admit it. I'm with them. The jab misses what these games get right.

The four things every friendslop game has

Strip away the horror theme and the ragdoll physics and the same four properties are always there.

You bring your own people. The game never puts you in a lobby with strangers, so there is no rank, no toxicity and nothing to grind. If the friends you brought are boring, the game is boring.

Anyone can play on their first night. Nobody has to learn a build or watch a tutorial. If your friend who only plays Mario Kart can't contribute inside five minutes, it isn't friendslop.

Everyone sees the same thing go wrong at the same time. The team wipe, the collapsed plan, the one person who panicked. Nobody remembers who won. Everyone retells the wipe.

It's cheap to get everyone in. Peak launched at $7.99. Lethal Company is $9.99. The whole genre runs on "just buy it, it's nothing," because the game is only worth anything if all four of you have it.

That last one is also the genre's ceiling. Every friendslop night starts with twenty minutes of "has everyone installed it", "mine is updating", "my laptop can't run it", and one friend on a phone who can't join at all.

Why there will be a lot more of it

Friendslop was growing before AI could write a game. What AI changes is who gets to make one.

For most of gaming's history, a fun idea needed a studio behind it. Someone had to be able to code, draw, animate and ship, and the people who could were busy making what sells. "A game where we're all potatoes and the salad is attacking" never got to exist, because no team of forty could justify it. The ideas that reached players were the ones that got past that filter, and most of the fun ones didn't.

A coding agent removes the filter. You describe the game, it builds it. The idea only has to be fun enough for your group chat, which is a much lower bar than a studio's. So expect games nobody would have funded, built out of whatever someone found funny at 11pm.

Friendslop is the genre that can absorb this. A game made from one prompt has rough edges. In most genres a bug is a reason to quit. In friendslop it is a reason to keep playing: the ragdoll that launches someone into orbit, the door that won't open, the physics that eats a player. People came to have fun with their friends, and every imperfection is one more thing to laugh at together.

Multiplayer is the hard part, and the fun part

Getting an agent to write a game is easy now. Getting it to write a game four people can play together is still hard, and I wrote a whole post on why that is. The short version: a game that works in two tabs on your laptop falls apart the moment your friends are on a real network, and fixing that is the kind of work studios have whole teams for.

A potato shooter you play alone is a curiosity. The same game with your group chat in it is a night. The fun of a friendslop game is the other people, so until the game can be sent to a group chat or put on the TV at home, it isn't finished.

That is the part antics does. Your agent writes the game, antics gives it rooms, keeps everyone's screen in sync, and hands back a link. Send it, your friends tap it, and everyone is in the same room on whatever they are holding: a laptop, a phone, the TV. No account to play, nothing to install, and the friend who only has a phone is in.

It is also why the friendslop shelf is the one I care about most. The games there are small and a little janky, both on purpose. Most were made by one person, and all of them started as a prompt. What they share is the moment where the whole call laughs at once.

6 friendslop games you can play from a link

All of these open in the browser. Rooms take 8 players with no account at all, 16 if you sign in. Send the link, play, blame each other.

1. SIDE OUT. Eight players, eight walls of one polygon, one ball coming at all of you. Miss twice and your wall shatters and the arena shrinks. The dead don't leave: they get traps to sabotage whoever is still standing. Nothing on the shelf produces betrayal faster.
2. Hide & Seed. Prop hunt in a Victorian palm house with 270 pots, crates and urns, one of which is your friend. The warden has a brass spraying machine and a limited magazine. The disguise never gives you away. The lone barrel in the middle of the floor does.
3. Fry Hard. You are all potatoes with too many guns, and the vegetable patch wants you for lunch. Weapons fire themselves, so the entire game is where you stand and when you dash. Every downed spud is officially the team's fault.
4. Ember Tide. Hold a volcanic caldera until dawn. The horde hunts whoever stands closest, so every friend who joins genuinely splits it. When someone goes down they are not dead, and the whole call yelling "GET HIM UP" is the game.
5. Crater Clash. Turn-based artillery on terrain that every shell permanently carves. 35-second turns, six weapons, and the map you end on looks nothing like the one you started on. Slow enough to argue over, which is the point.
6. SandStorm. A co-op shooter where every cell of the ground is simulated: sand pours, oil catches, lava cools into stone. Everyone shares one world, so the crater you dig is the one your friend falls into.

You can find the full list of friendslop games to play at antics.gg/games/friendslop. It has nine games today and grows when someone makes one worth keeping.

You could make one of these

Friendslop games are small enough that one person makes them now. Describe the game to a coding agent, it writes it, antics gives it rooms and a link, and your group chat is playing it the same evening. Most of the games above started as one sentence.

If you have ever said "someone should make a game where we all...", you are the someone. Start here.