It has been a rough couple of years in the games industry with layoffs and studio closures. However, from the perspective of a single-I or small team, we are in the middle of a golden age and most developers don’t realize it.

(Side note most journalists don’t realize we are in a golden age either but I figure that has to do with the press negativity bias) 

We are in the midst of a Great Conjunction. It doesn’t happen very often and we all must stop and celebrate. This blog is an argument for optimisim. It is long. It has a lot of charts. Pesimism is easy and nobody gets in trouble for saying stuff will get worse. It takes a lot of bravery and work to tell people to be optimistic and that good times are here.

Why we should be optimistic

The Great Conjunction is what I am calling a weird period of time where the genres that are “easier” to make are also the games that Steam players are hungry for. Gamers are begging us to make them games and luckily the games to satisfy them can be produced quickly.

This is a good thing! All developers should hail the great conjunction!

The last Great Conjunction was when Vampire Survivors dropped in 2021. I wrote about it here.

Many devs heeded the call of the Great Conjunction like this developer 

He made 20 Minutes Till Dawn which earned $500,000 in 1 week.

Soren Lundguard of Ghost Ship Games heeded the call of the last Great Conjunction. In this podcast interview (at 36 minute mark) Soren said 

“I read Chris Zukowski’s Excellent Blog articles on this and he identified this genre and inspired some other developers to pivot their projects into the Vampire Survivors genre and they succeeded! And then I thought ‘ok we can do it as well!’”

Soren Lundguard of Ghost Ship Games

He went on to co-develop Deep Rock Galactic Survivor which sold over 1 million copies

I wrote more about Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor here

The Great Conjunction Games

As great as the Vampire-Survivors Great Conjunction was, we are in the middle of an even greater one right now. 

Right now there isn’t just 1 genre that is hitting. We are seeing 4 to 6 genres (depending on how you divide horror games) simultaneously experience a Great Conjunction. 

In 10 years, new developers are going to look back at 2024, 2025, and likely 2026 longingly and say “dang I wasn’t lucky enough to be making games in that period when you could put together a quick game and make it go viral.”

In today’s blog I will argue to first appreciate what is going on right now. And second, that the safest thing for most game developers right now is to stop development on your current project, and try out a new fast-follow micro genre, with the goal of releasing it within the next 4-6 months.

This is your time. Please be optimistic. Please, make a rapid release game now.

Let me explain…

Steam players want fun first 

I first noticed this with Vampire Survivors years ago: simple graphics, gameplay depth, addicting game loop. Players bought in. Now the Vampire Survivor-like genre is mostly saturated (more on that in a minute) but players haven’t given up on the idea of fun-to-play-but-rough-around the edges. 

That is what the Great Conjunction is about. Genres that are so fun that players look past graphics and polish. They just want tight, fun, deep gameplay. 

The goal here is to make a game fast, throw it out there as a demo, or a playtest, and see if people think the game is fun. If it is, ship it. 

If people don’t think it is fun, ship it too and then MOVE ON, and develop another game. For these types of games, you cannot “polish” it to make it fun. You know it right away. It is either fun or not. This (hopefully) prevents endless rework, scope creep, and long development times.

What genres are experiencing a Great Conjunction right now?

For the rest of the blog, I am going to describe these games as “Great Conjunction” games. All of these games are going super viral right now and for most cases these games are easier to make. 

Formally, there isn’t much connecting these various games other than they are quick, dirty, and fun to play. So this Great Conjunction term is not trying to describe the type of game but rather the fact that everyone wants them right now and it is probably fleeting.

When I say there are “4 to 6 genres that are part of the Great Conjunction” I am specifically talking about these:

  • Friend-slop
  • Idle / Incremental games
  • Horror meta-genre (this is where the counting the number of genres gets dicy)
    • Horror casino
    • Horror friend-slop
    • Horror simulation
    • Pure horror
  • Simulation (mostly shop simulators but can be other things too)
  • Rage games
  • Autobattlers
  • (MAYBE) Vampire Survivors gen 2

Friend-slop

Yes, Yes, Yes, I know everyone is talking about friend-slop. Everyone is making one too. I was curious how big it is right now so I downloaded the daily concurrent user count (CCU) for the top 23 Friend-slop games since 2020 and smushed them all into one graph lined up by release date. (See the appendix at the end of the post for the list of the games. Note: I don’t consider games like Among Us friend-slop because they are social-deduction.)

Co-op friend games have been around for a long time and they have been on a low simmer. But, when Lethal Company launched at the end of 2023, it unleashed a wave of interest in silly games you could play with your friends. 

We should divide friend-slop in terms of BLC (Before Lethal Company) And ALC (After Lethal Company). It was a generational leap. My theory is that Lethal Company introduced so many people to the pleasures of co-op gaming that they started looking for more and more games that could fulfill that need. 

Most of the early co-op games were horror, but the most recent revelation was to extend co-op into new challenges such as climbing a mountain, paddling a raft, driving an RV and more. Let’s explore…

Peak – Co-op mountain climber. After spending 3 years making Another Crab’s Treasure the team pivoted and developed Peak in a couple months.

RV There Yet has had over 100,000 concurrent players and according to their patch notes it took them just 8 weeks to build.

It isn’t just released games. I have been tracking Next Fest for years and this October Steam Next Fest was surprisded by how many Friend-slop (and slightly adjacent) games reached the top of the charts.

 YAPYAP is the rapid release follow-on for the studio Maison Bap after they made BAPBAP. I talked to the developer.

“BAPBAP we spent too long on. Like 5 years. We went through a lot of iteration cycles to try and make it work but it just never picked up. Eventually we changed it from a battle royale to a party game so we don’t have to worry about live player counts and we can move on.

YAPYAP was a brand new project. Very little reused. Total dev time is less than a year.“

IHeartPie of the YAPYAP dev team

PADDLE PADDLE PADDLE sold 100K copies amazingly fast despite having a short dev time. The developer gave a great interview here. They spent years working on a pixel art platformer and it underperformed so they quickly made a co-op friend game about paddling and it outsold the pixel art platformer in days. 

It isn’t just friend-slop though. There are many more rapid release games doing well on Steam.

Horror is still hot

Yes, horror is still a great genre to make and yes fans accept horror games that are a little rough around the edges. I wrote a much longer piece about why every dev should make a horror game. 

My old blog post is still true!

The team behind Roadside Research did great with their previous horror game Order 13 which released in March of 2025. The game was developed in 3.5 months according to Mike Coeck, Cofounder of the game’s studio Cybernetic Walrus.  

The other thing is horror theming can be mixed in with these other Conjunction Games

In fact almost half of all friend-slop games in the top 23 are horror games. Phasmophobia and Lethal Company basically set the standard for friend slop. Here is the CCU chart but I labeled every time a horror-co-op game took off.

A couple things to note about this chart:

  • Some games hit their max CCU many weeks after their initial launch. For instance Backgrooms Escape Together launched in October 2022, but hit Max CCU in October 2024.
  • Notice the number of Horror Friend slop games that hit are increasing and getting closer together.
  • Notice that lately Horror Friend slop games are finding success simultaneously such as Backrooms Escape Together and Dark Hours. Then again Zort and Kletka. These games are so hot fans are buying and playing as many as they can. Remember, this is CCU. BOTH games are getting high CCU on the same days. 
  • That isn’t a typo. There really is a game called Escape the Backrooms and another hit game titled Backrooms Escape Together. When two very similar games both hit, that is a sign we are in a Great Conjunction.

Horror mixes (Casino or Idle)

Another interesting crossbreed that fans are going crazy for are horror+gambling. Sounds weird but here are just a few:

Buckshot Roulette – Horror + Roulette. In a Reddit AMA the solo developer said the initial release took him just over 2 months. The game sits at over 30,000 reviews

Cloverpit – Horror + Slot Machines – The lead of the game’s publisher Thomas Reisenegger (of Future Friends) confirmed for me that the team took just over 1 year to make the game. It sold 750,000 copies in 2 weeks.

Slots & Daggers – Grimdark (not quite Horror) + Slots) Yes Thomas Reisenegger (of Future Friends) published 2 grim-dark slot-machine gambling games within one month of each other and they both did AMAZING. When two very similar games both hit… Great Conjunction.

Thomas confirmed that the game started development 8 months before launch and it sold 100,000 units in 10 days. 

CLICKOLDING is a horror incremental game with over 1488 reviews. As documented in Wired, the idea was spawned in March 2024 and released 3 months later.

Autobattlers & Strategy

Oaken Tower – A pixelart PvP strategy autobattler that  was on the front page of the most played demos list during the October Steam Next Fest. Despite not being out yet, the demo consistently has over 200 concurrent players (CCU). I talked to the solo developer at Bocary Studios. He confirmed

“It took only 2 months to make but been making updates and big improvements for around 6 months :)”

Developer at Bocary Studios

Idle / Incremental Games

Incremental games have been around for years but I think when BANANA went viral it introduced people to this genre. Since then there have been dozens of hit idle games. The good news is they can typically be developed in a few months.

Desktop Defender – This was one of the most played demos during the October 2025 Steam Next Fest. I talked to the developer behind it, Conradical. He told me that Desktop Defender took about 2 weeks to develop and will end up probably being 1 month total with it releasing in November 2025. 

“What im doing (and have been doing since July) is making small games and big games at the same time

so im doing 6 games in 12 months. 1 is a bigger one, the others are smaller ones a la Desktop Defender. Do the big ones for prestige/deals/etc. and the small ones to fill in the gaps revenue wise and sometimes the small ones do particularly well, e.g. desktop defender haha”

Here is Conradical’s “big game”: Synth Beasts.

Conradical

A Game About Feeding A Black Hole – One of the developers behind the game documents his journey on Youtube and released this video about how they got 10,000 wishlists in a single week. 

He has made other games before such as a Vampire-Survivors-like mixed with Chess and a simplified strategy God game. Those haven’t taken off as quickly as his idle game. I asked him about what it feels like to make a game in one of these quick-to-make genres.

“My 2nd game commercial Hexagod has not been financially successful. So my only goal for this game, A Game About Feeding a Black Hole, was to make it financially successful based on my time investment. And since it’s hard to control the sales variable, my only option was to limit my time investment and I ended up choosing 300 hours. I also partnered with Corey Darby who helped make Click and Conquer since they made that game in a similarly short timeline. We’ve found it helpful to have time constraints since it literally forces us to cut stuff that would have taken too long and probably would have just made the game less fun. So far the market has validated that the simplicity and good pacing worked in the demo. As of writing this, the game has just over 25,000 wishlists with basically all of that coming post demo launch a month ago.

Honestly I feel way less emotionally attached to this project than Hexagod or Chess Survivors. Our target is for a few hours of gameplay so I feel less pressure to add crazy amounts of replayability. On top of that we already have plans for my next game so in a lot of ways I feel a lot less pressure here. With the explosion of wishlists I feel far more confident in this idea which has also made finishing the game a lot easier since we simply need to take what’s in the demo and do more of that. Whereas my older demo’s were not received nearly as well (only a couple thousand wishlists by release) so I always felt the production phase of those games still had a lot of “finding the fun” going on.“

Aarimous

Shop Simulation

Yes, I know, everyone is making <blank>-market Simulators. They might be over. 

However, we are now entering the next generation of shop-simulators which involves remixing it in strange ways. If you do something funny or clever with it, it is still very viable. 

Roadside Research  – Again consider Steam Next Fest Top Demo #12 Roadside Research which hit 250,000 wishlists super fast. See this article by Game Discover Co.

The game combines Friend-slop with Simulation. It is a bit more complicated but Mike Coeck again confirmed that it is only taking them 10 months to complete it. 

HELLMART – Hellmart is literally pitched as “Supermarket simulator meets horror.” It was the #43 most popular demo during the October Steam Next Fest. The team just announced that they earned 120,000 wishlists. 

I talked to the developer Alexander Styageilo about the development and he said “We made the first prototype in February [2025], and full-scale work with the art team began in April, by which time the core gameplay was already ready.” That is 8-9 months of develpment.

Storebound is ANOTHER Horror-Store-Simulator but this one supports co-op! It was one of the most played demos of the October 2025 Steam Next Fest. When two very similar games both hit… Great Conjunction.

Rage games

I think a lot of these rage games got subsumed by Friend-Slop and are not as hot as they once were. Bennet Foddy’s Baby Steps seems to have underperformed a little considering he basically invented the genre with Getting Over It.

But I still think they are fairly viable as a rapid release strategy. They feature graphics that LOOK storebought, typical janky physics (with Buster Keaton style prat falls), and weird main character design

Only Up (No Steam Page) – Has a checkered past, but the difficult 3D platformer with store bought assets really went viral. 

There are similar games out there that have done well with similarly short timelines.

Get To Work 

Unicycle Pizza Time! – While not a big hit, it is the top seller in the “Biteme” games guys catalog.

A Difficult Game About Climbing

Baby Steps. 

Vampire Survivors gen 2

It has been 4 years since the release of Vampire Survivors and I consider the Great Conjunction for Vampire Survivor likes over. The only games doing well at this point have VERY high production values (Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel) or are paired with trusted intellectual property like Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and Temtem: Swarm.

I charted out the cumulative CCU for the entire history of Vampire Survivor-likes and charted them against the history of Friend-Slop. Note that the X axis is the number of days after the “breakthrough” games were released. For instance, the blue line starts the day Vampire Survivors Launched (Oct 20, 2022), the red starts when Phasmaphobia launched (Sep 18, 2020)

Notice how even at the absolute peak of the Vampire Survivor Craze, the genre only reached the heights of Friend-slop in the BLC (Before Lethal Company) era. 

The release of Megabonk had a higher CCU than the highest peak of Vampire Survivors. Vampire Survivors-likes are only now reaching the heights of the ALC (After Lethal Company) era. 

Maybe, just maybe, Megabonk showed a new way forward with the genre just like Lethal Company did. Maybe we are entering an AMB (After Megabonk Era.) Maybe it is time to make a bonk-like to be ahead of the next Great Conjunction? This is the riskiest play of all the great conjunction games.

No more YEARS LONG developers SUFFERING for their ART

My least favorite thing about indie game development is the fetishization of developers who SUFFER for YEARS for their ART. Journalists  LOVE to cover suffering developers like the poor guys who spent 13 years making their game ROUTINE.

Indie Game the Movie was almost 2 hours of developers SUFFERING FOR THEIR ART. The indie ethos is still trying to recover after that film set the standard of how to properly suffer for your game.

This SUFFER FOR YOUR ART attitude is not healthy. It is not fun. It shouldn’t be valorized the way the press does. I know it makes a good story, but it isn’t good for you. I hate how new indie developers read SUFFER FOR YOUR ART lit and think this is the path forward. Please don’t be a martyr for game development by spending years on a single art project.

The strength of Indie game developers is that we are small, quick, nimble, innovators, who can move faster, take risks that big lumbering companies like EA, Ubisoft, Activision cannot take. The big giants are supposed to take too long on their game. Not small indies like us. 

I much prefer valorizing the John Romero and John Carmack and their early-Id days. They made dozens of quick games per year. They could see that 3D was coming and they “chased the trend” of 3D releasing many games exploring what that meant. 

We should valorize the early flash game developers who released games on Flash portals in just a few weeks to see what worked.

We should valorize the early mobile game development scene which was so fun. It was full of people chasing trends quickly and we got amazing innovation with games like Angry Birds, Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird, and Crossy Road. 

The best part of these Great Conjunction Games is you get to focus on developing the fun parts. The game systems, the concepts, the scenarios. The worst part of game dev is the endless polish, testing, and edge cases you have to account for.

When you develop on the genre avant guard, fans will let you get away with “jank.” because they are so excited to play the next new game in the hot genre. 

I am not saying this to be mean, but Roadside Research has some definite “jank.” I am regularly catching my arm in the environment and twisting it up into gnarly configurations.

THIS IS A GOOD THING! You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of dev time polishing and polishing and animating every single interaction. When you pick the right genre, you can get the game out there faster and cheaper. There still needs to be SOME quality – you can’t release absolute trash that doesn’t run – but people are generally more forgiving.

In Peak I was easily able to break through the roof in the opening hub by climbing the giant skeleton during the Halloween update. This is totally fine. Indie games don’t need to be overworked and overpolished. It takes away the fun and hides the hand-made work of the creators. 

Marketing is super charged

When you pick a game that is in a Great Conjunction, the “Steam Meta Rules” don’t apply because steam shoppers are so hungry they eat anything that resembles the new trend before it is even fully cooked.

Consider the Friend-slop wizard game Mage Arena that quickly amassed 9000+ reviews, a peak CCU of 17,000 and a capsule that looks like this:

And art that looks like this:

I love how charmingly sloppy and hand-made this game is! I am not hating on this game!

The Mage Arena Steam page was live for only 3 months before launch. 

It broke every rule of Steam and did fantastically. 

Consider idle game Desktop Defender that went into the Steam Next Fest October 2025 edition with 200 wishlists, a non-professional-illustrator pixel art capsule, and a steam page that was only live for 3 months. It broke just about every rule I talked about here.

Yet Desktop Defender earned 20,000 wishlists during next fest and was a top-50 played demos. thats a 100x multiplier!

By the way, Desktop Defender launches today. You should pick it up!

You can take a break

One thing brought on by the advent of this Great Conjunction is that developers are rightfully stopping production on their long-in-development over-polished games in underperforming genres to recharge and rekindle the magic of game development. 

Before RV There Yet released, the developers spent 4 YEARS working on a very deep Crafty-Buildy-Creature Collector named Among the Wild.

In this video their community manager described how during their 2025 Summer vacation they did a game jam and made  RV There Yet in 8 weeks.

SERIOUSLY! Watch the video, this quote stood out.

“Unlike Among the Wild, which is actually incredibly complicated and complex, you could play with friends and it may even be really fun to watch as well. So, it was this this neat little prototype that we’d come up with that seemed to have kind of everything we’d want and more.

Specifically though, it was also the type of game that could have as much or as little polish as we wanted. It’s a game that could actually maybe even be better if less work went into it, like, if there’s a little bit of jankiness to it or something like that, right? Yeah. Maybe better to not overthink this kind of game. “

Jace Varlet Community manager at Nuggets Entertainment

“But the benefits of the other game [RV There Yet] could be that it might just be a breath of fresh air for the team if we’re able to just release something because Nuggets Entertainment as this studio in its form hasn’t released a game yet. So, it might just be a nice morale boost for the team to get something out there, to get y’all playing something that we’ve done. There’s also just a strong sense of energy in the team that wants to work on the game because everyone is excited about this little game as well and they want to work on it.”

Jace Varlet Community manager at Nuggets Entertainment

This is very similar to the developer of one of the first Vampire-Survivor-Like-Fast-Follows 20 minutes till dawn. The developer Flanne worked for FIVE YEARS on a Tactical RPG called Spiritlink Tactics. He was burned out, so took a break and made 20 Minutes Till Dawn in a few months and it earned over 12,000 reviews. Flanne has never gone back to finish Spiritlink Tactics. I don’t blame him. He made the wise choice. 

Here is what Flanne told me back then:

“I really was tired of working on Spiritlink Tactics for over 5 years (huge mistake to commit to an ambitious RPG as a inexperienced solo dev, in my opinion). And over the years, I felt like my skills have gotten so much better as a game dev, so I really wanted to take on a new project.

[20 Minutes Till Dawn’s] Wishlists after 2 weeks on Steam caught up to my other game [Spiritlink Tactics].”

Flanne (HTMAG article)

Read the full back story of the game in my blog post published about 3 years ago..

But what if the bubble pops and the Great Conjunction is over before I release my game?

THIS ISN’T RISK FREE. This isn’t a guaranteed safe bet. More than likely your Great Conjunction game will still fail. 

But this Great Conjunction is likely the best chance you have right now.

Even if your Conjunction game fails, you shipped something!

There is no shame in that.

Here is what you did:

But seriously, if nothing else, you will have fun! I know Grand Conjunction games might not be a genre YOU ARE PASSIONATE about. But seriously, watch how happy Aarimous is that one of his games is FINALLY doing well and getting the recognition he deserves. 

Watch his old streams and compare them to his happy Black Hole Videos. 

I want this for you!

Aren’t you just CHASING TRENDS?

Well ya. Yes. You are chasing trends.

I don’t like how “chasing trends” has this presumptive negativity to it. Steam shoppers really really want these types of games. We are feeding the gamers who are hungry for new games. They are looking for them, they need us to make these games for them. 

We should feed them!

Yes these games are a trend. These trends will end some day. But that is what being on the cutting edge of a culture looks like. Gaming is a vibrant, constantly evolving art form. We are lucky that we create in a medium that is so alive. Critics lambast how stagnant film, literature, and the visual arts have become. We should be thankful that we have trends to chase. 

Chasing trends is better than making a game that has almost 0 proven success on Steam which means after launch you have to go back to your day job.

I want you to chase trends so you can quit the day job you hate. I want to make sure you don’t have to go and beg for them to let you back to your old job at Electronic Arts. I want to make sure you don’t have to pick up contract work. You deserve to be a full time dev making a decent living!

If you do well with a great conjunction game, your next game can do the opposite! You can make a game where you are chasing failures, or fleeing from trends. Whatever. But chasing trends allows you to do what you want.

BUT CHRIS! You told me Crafty-Buildy games were hot! Now it is Friend-slop? 

Both are true! 

YES! These Great Conjunction games like Friend-slop and horror games are popular today!

AAAAAND

YES! Crafty-buildy-simulationy-strategy are still very popular too! 

If I look just at the Top 50 Most Played demos of the October Steam Next Fest are I classify 48% of them as Crafty Buildy. Great Conjunction are 14%. The “OTHER” section at 38% are games that take forever to develop: dude-with-a-sword-going-on-an-adventure games, RPGs, FPSs, Racing Games. 

Furthermore, just over a week ago, Hooded Horse released my most anticipated crafty-buildy-strategy game Super Fantasy Kingdom and it did great! It already has over 1100 reviews and 12,000 CCU. 

Crafty-Buildy is STILL HOT!

Most development studios should be trying to make Crafty-Buildy Games… someday.

Crafty Buildy is the sun. It will rise every day. It will be there for the rest of our lifetime. It is the source of all life on Steam. Bask in its warmth.

However, Crafty-Buildy games are very expensive to make. They are complex. You need to be a more experienced dev to do well here. They take a long time to make. They are a good LONG TERM play. 

Right now, we have the Great Conjunction going on! We don’t know how long this will last. It might be fleeting. During a Great Conjunction you can make something fast AND popular on Steam. It is a lower risk, higher upside play.

So don’t freak out! If you are hard at work on a crafty-buildy game, and it is doing well, and you are launching soon, keep at it. 

Oh, and by the way, what about platformers, VR games, most puzzle games, and party-games? They aren’t the sun or the Great Conjunction. Unfortunately there isn’t much of an audience here. I am really sorry.

But Chris… Survivorship Bias!

Here is where I am contractually obligated by reddit commenters to post this image and explain survivorship bias.

Yes I am looking at games that succeeded. 

Yes there are games that have failed. No I haven’t calculated what percentage of Friend-slop games have succeeded and compared that to the baseline success ratio of every other genre. 

Yes, Cuffbust, despite earning hundreds of thousands of wishlists, crashed at launch because of a lack of content and pricing that did not match expectations. 

There will be Great Conjunction games that fail too. 

There is no guarantee here. 

If you want 0-risk, get rich quick business opportunities, go into some other industry.

The reason I point out these successes is because they serve as an example. Studying the “survivors” is a totally valid research method that is called “Positive deviance”

Per Wikipedia Positive Deviance “is based on the idea that, within a community, some individuals engage in unusual behaviors allowing them to solve problems better than others who face similar challenges, despite not having additional resources or knowledge. These individuals are referred to as positive deviants” 

The Great Conjunction is definitely unusual behavior. I want you to be a “positive deviant.” 

You have to trust my experience here. I have been studying the Steam marketplace for close to a decade and the weird behavior we are seeing here is something to note! It is odd. It is exciting. It is worth looking at. 

Should you make a Great Conjunction game?

So, should you pull a Nuggets Entertainment and pause development on your multi-year project to make a Great Conjunction Game? Should you pull a Flanne and stop development on your TRPG to make a Vampire-Survivors Like?

For most developers…YES, absolutely! Do it! 

Provided you can legally do that because you don’t have some sort of contractual obligation to a publisher to finish your current game first. 

But if you are your own boss, don’t throw out your current game. Just check it in. Back it up. Double back it up. And free yourself.

I have written WAAAY TOO much and I know most people are only going to read the first paragraph and then write something mean about “chasing trends” on Reddit. I am going to stop here and write a second blog post this week deep diving into what my recommendations are for how to tackle making one of these.

But in short, unless you are a few weeks away from releasing a game that has proven momentum (based on howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks) you should take a dev break and make a Grand Conjunction Game and ship at least a demo before the start of the February Next Fest.

GO!

NOTE: Please wait until after I have written part 2 of this topic before you post this blog to Reddit with the title “Thoughts?” so that I don’t have people yelling at me for things I didn’t have room to fit into this blog.

And if you hate me for “chasing trends” fine, don’t make a Conjunction game. I don’t care. I am not your Dad, you don’t have to listen to me. I just want the best for you.

Appendix: sampled friend-slop games

These are the games that were in the above CCU charts

  • Phasmophobia
  • Muck
  • Crab Game
  • Escape the Backrooms
  • One-armed cook
  • Backrooms Escape Together
  • The Outlast Trials
  • Lethal Company
  • One-armed robber
  • Content Warning
  • Abiotic Factor
  • PILGRIM
  • Chained Together
  • Dark Hours
  • Zort
  • Kletka
  • The Headliners
  • REPO
  • Peak
  • Mage Arena
  • Paddle Paddle Paddle
  • YAPYAP (Demo)
  • RV There Yet

Games I excluded from the chart because I don’t consider them Friend-slop but rather Social Deducation games

  • Among Us
  • Dale & Dawson
  • LOCKDOWN Protocol

Now it is time for me to sit down.