try out this friendslop with me, dont worry, we wont have to talk any more afterwards, heh … heh… heh
3 Likes
Don’t Starve might be this, or at least every time I’ve been exposed to it that’s what it was. A friend had her birthday party inside Don’t Starve. I was thinking, “I love you but this game is terrible.”
8 Likes
Yeah I think the key with these is that any legitimate group of friends will have some goofy fun with the barely-there mechanics but then be like “all right got our fill of that let’s move on to the next thing for our digital hangout.” Might get like 4 or 6 hours out of it.
Anyone who is willing to play these for longer is doing it for The Bit and almost certainly for an audience, and their “friends” are like beloved sitcom characters who are too popular to be written off the show. Farming their “friends” for content the same way you’d farm mobs for gold and xp.
“Coop streamerbait” gets the same idea across but I kinda like “friendfarmer” because it’s more contemptuous and derogatory
5 Likes
To be clear that means like Terraria, Minecraft, League and Barotrauma shouldn’t be on this guy’s list, much less near the top of it, because those are actual games but just because the guy who coined it is stupid doesn’t mean I can’t like the term
7 Likes
tower unite
2 Likes
all genre names should just end in -slop
8 Likes
gartic phone is S tier what the fuck
4 Likes
As coined, it loops in anything that you could play with a group of friends (Jackbox, Gartic Phone, Barotrauma, League, etc.) and lumps it in with games that are explicitly designed to be played with a group of friends, and you can probably argue the primary use case is for streamers, and for non-broadcasted groups secondarily (Lethal Company, REPO, etc.). It’s taking a noticeable trend, games that are designed for the streaming space, and creating a weird back formation with just, any game that could be played collectively involving voice chat?
Notable exclusions that should really be there are Among Us and Fall Guys, and I’m wondering if they’re not there because the OP has some criteria that eliminates them, or whether that this is so bleeding-edge that those titles have already fallen off the online brainpan (although that wouldn’t really explain why Jackbox and Gartic Phone are there).
(Dead by Daylight and Phasmophobia are also interesting use cases because they feel like proto-friendfarmers, games that were made for a different purpose, were discovered to work really well within that context, and then had an outside influence on later titles.)
Really looking forward to the inevitable YouTube essay about how Left 4 Dead is a friendfarmer.
2 Likes
they probably have incredibly annoying and unfunny friends
3 Likes
Yearnfarming at an all time low.
11 Likes
rare for me to axepost in kop, but:
7 Likes
These are “coworker games”, as in, these are the games your least favorite coworker is constantly trying to get you to play.
9 Likes
peak
3 Likes
Been enjoying this a lot lately.
2 Likes
I think Peak is too mechanically involved for me to call it a friendfarmer. It’s quite fun solo! Great game. Definitely adjacent, though.
3 Likes
Yeah this really sets it a part. Most of these games feel like a half-game if you play them with just two players, but this game is fun at two or even just one.
1 Like