I’ve been playing games for most of my life, and for most of that time, the promise was always the same: next year, they’ll look even more real. Better textures. More polygons. Ray tracing. Each hardware generation inched us closer to some imagined finish line where games would be indistinguishable from movies, and that was supposed to be the point. The whole industry seemed to agree on this. Billions of dollars agreed on this.

The Gap Between What Gets Built and What Gets Played

Bain & Company ran a massive gamer survey in 2025, and one finding keeps rattling around in my head. When asked what matters most in their favorite games, only 7% of respondents picked graphics or audio. Gameplay took the top spot at 22%. I know percentages on their own can feel abstract, so let me put it differently: the thing the industry has spent the most money chasing for thirty years is roughly a third as important as the thing indie devs in India (excuse the pun) are done on popular gaming platforms at odds96 level.

The Metacritic numbers tell a similar story. Last year, 75% of the platform’s top 20 highest-rated games were indie titles, up from about 40% in 2016. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Blue Prince, Hades 2 — these games didn’t just hang with the big-budget releases. They were the standard everyone else got measured against. By mid-year, indie studios held eight of Steam’s top 20 most-played spots.

Then there’s the spending data, which is where things get really interesting. Circana found that 18-to-24-year-olds cut their gaming spending by 13% in early 2025 versus the year before. But gaming time didn’t drop. Young players were still playing constantly; they were just choosing $10 co-op games over $70 blockbusters, free-to-play sandboxes over console exclusives. The money was going elsewhere. The attention wasn’t.

What Is Friendslop?

“Friendslop” sounds like something you’d call a bad potluck dish. But it’s the term that stuck for the wave of cheap, scrappy, cooperative games that basically took over gaming culture in 2025, so we’re going with it.

The idea is simple. You and three or four friends buy a game for under ten bucks each. The graphics are modest at best. There’s some kind of shared objective — climb a mountain, hunt ghosts, run a delivery service in an RV — and the actual fun comes from talking to each other over proximity chat while everything goes horribly, hilariously wrong. Someone falls off a cliff mid-sentence. Someone gets grabbed by a monster while explaining their strategy. You clip it, post it to TikTok, and suddenly a million people want to buy the game too.

Peak, the climbing game I mentioned, sold a million copies in its first week. The developers had nearly shelved it after losing funding years earlier. R.E.P.O., a co-op horror game that looks like it was made during a 48-hour game jam, earned its creators an estimated $147 million. Schedule 1, which one writer called perhaps the ugliest game of the year, built a devoted audience anyway because it turns out running a simulated drug empire with your college roommates is really, really fun.

Morgan Park at PC Gamer made a point that I think gets to the core of it. He argued that chasing photorealism has become “not just boring and alienating, but increasingly a risky business decision, too.” The friendslop wave is the proof. These games run on laptops from 2016. They spread through friend groups like inside jokes. And they made their developers rich.

It’s Not Just About Being Broke

The obvious explanation is economic. Gen Z is financially squeezed — student loans, a tough job market, rising costs everywhere — so of course they’re buying cheaper games. That’s real, and it matters. But I think stopping there misses the bigger picture.

Think about what this generation actually grew up on. Not Call of Duty. Not Assassin’s Creed. They grew up on Minecraft and Roblox, platforms where playing the game and making the game are basically the same activity. Roblox now hosts over 44 million user-created experiences. It hit 144 million daily active users by Q4 2025. Its top 1,000 creators averaged $1.3 million in earnings last year. A game called Steal a Brainrot — built in four months by a small group of young developers — reached 25 million users in a single month. The platform’s quarterly revenue jumped 43% year-on-year to $1.41 billion.

When your formative gaming experience is a platform where a teenager can build something that millions of people play, your expectations shift. You stop seeing games as products to consume and start seeing them as spaces to inhabit, build in, and share. A $200 million cinematic action game with 40 hours of scripted content starts looking a little… passive? One-directional? Why watch someone else’s story when you could be making your own with your friends?

There’s a loneliness angle here too, and it’s one I think gets underreported. Three out of four American Gen Z respondents in a 2023 survey said they “sometimes or always feel lonely.” That number floored me when I first saw it. Games built around cooperation, shared struggle, and collective goofing off aren’t just entertainment for this demographic. They’re a lifeline. Harper Jay MacIntyre at Inverse went so far as to call friendslop “a real path to salvation from divisive and isolating times,” which might sound dramatic until you consider what the alternative looks like — scrolling alone through algorithmic feeds at 1 a.m.

Meanwhile, in the AAA Trenches

The contrast on the other side of the industry is brutal. AAA development budgets regularly blow past $200 million. Production cycles stretch five, six, seven years. Studios ship games with day-one bugs and monetization schemes that feel designed by an algorithm, because often they were. Almost one in three gaming industry professionals will lose their jobs by 2025. Studios like Monolith Productions and Arkane Austin — places that made genuinely beloved games — closed their doors for good.

Bain called it a “pincer movement.” On one side, indie studios are making better games for less money. On the other, platform games like Roblox and Fortnite are pulling players into self-sustaining creative ecosystems that don’t need new $70 releases to keep people engaged. The AAA middle is getting crushed.

And the thing is, you can see why. A five-person indie team can take a weird creative swing, charge ten bucks, and if it hits on TikTok, they’ve got a smash. A 500-person AAA studio spending $200 million can’t afford weird. They need broad appeal, safe bets, franchise extensions. Halil Onur, an indie developer at Team Machiavelli, was blunt about it: “The biggest opportunity for small teams right now is the fact that AAA and AA sectors are fumbling.” It’s hard to argue with him.

Where This All Goes

I want to be clear that I’m not writing an obituary for big-budget games. GTA VI is going to sell approximately one billion copies. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was PC Gamer’s game of the year. There will always be room for ambitious, expensive, visually stunning games that push hardware to its limits.

But the center of gravity is moving. The cultural conversation — the games that dominate Discord servers and TikTok feeds and group chats — increasingly belongs to smaller, stranger, more personal projects. The tools keep getting better and cheaper. The indie market is projected to hit $9.55 billion by 2030. Roblox is gunning for 10% of the entire global gaming content market. Browser-based games are making a comeback, with 15,000 hitting the web in the first half of 2025 alone.

For Gen Z, none of this registers as a “shift” or a “trend.” It’s just… how games are. They’ve always lived in a world where someone could build a hit in their bedroom, where the best game at a sleepover costs less than a coffee, where what matters most isn’t how a game looks but whether your friends are already in the lobby.

The industry spent decades assuming the future of games was about getting closer to reality. Turns out a lot of players would rather get closer to each other.