Back to Our Roots

The video game industry has never been bigger, yet it feels more fragile than ever. Modern AAA titles routinely demand thousands of developers, artists, and engineers laboring for five, six, or even seven years. Budgets balloon into the hundreds of millions. Every game ships stuffed with systems, cinematics, open worlds, microtransactions, live-service layers, and endless DLC roads. The result? Experiences that are undeniably impressive on a technical level but often exhausting to actually play — and ruinously expensive to make.

We’ve reached a point where the sheer complexity of game design is struggling to pull its own weight. When you need 10,000 smart people on one project for half a decade just to ship something playable, something has gone deeply wrong with how we allocate talent and resources.

The Healthy Reset

The wave of layoffs that has swept the industry in recent years is painful for those affected. No one celebrates talented people losing their jobs. But stepping back, this moment feels like a long-overdue correction. The era of ever-escalating scope, infinite crunch, and corporate bloat was unsustainable. We built an industry that required blockbuster-scale success on every single release just to break even. That model doesn’t scale any further.

The silver lining? Thousands of experienced AAA developers are now entering the indie space. Many are forming small teams, picking up tools like Unreal, Unity, Godot, and even building their own engines from scratch. This migration isn’t a downgrade — it’s the seeding ground for the next generation of AAA giants. History shows that the biggest franchises and studios often sprout from humble, focused beginnings.

To make that transition successful, we as designers need to get back to our roots.

The Classics That Started It All

Before ray tracing, before gigabytes of texture data, before procedural generation and AI companions, games were something far simpler — and often more magical.

These games didn’t have marketing budgets, narrative consultants, or motion-capture studios. They had limited memory, primitive displays, and almost no storage. What they did have was razor-sharp focus on what actually matters.

The Kernel of Greatness

We don’t need to make games as basic as Spacewar! in 2026. Modern tools give us incredible power that earlier developers could only dream of. But we should ask the hard question: when you strip away all the RAM, hard disk space, and GPU teraflops, what are we left with? What is the irreducible kernel that makes a great game a great game?

To me, the answer is obvious: fun with friends.

Look at those early titles. Almost every foundational game was multiplayer. They had to be. With such constrained technology, the only way to generate rich, unpredictable interaction was to plug in two or more human minds. The computer provided the arena and the rules. The players supplied the chaos, strategy, rivalry, and laughter.

That remains the unique magic of games compared to any other medium. Books, movies, and television are authored experiences delivered to a passive audience. Games — especially multiplayer ones — are collaborative playgrounds. The best ones create spaces where friends can be silly, competitive, creative, or deeply tactical together.

Ignore the “Friendslop” Discouragement

As veteran AAA developers transition to smaller projects, you’ll hear dismissive voices. “That’s just friendslop.” “Too basic.” “We’ve seen this before.” “Every other game is just friendslop now.”

Pay them no mind.

“Friendslop” — simple, focused, multiplayer-first experiences — is the embryo that created the entire industry. Historically, it was either VERSUS or CO-OP. “Friendslop” is something in-between. It feels 3-parts-co-op and 1-part-versus in many cases, but it deserves a new genre name. I don’t know what we’ll end up calling it, but I don’t think the name “friendslop” will last. I do think the 2020s will come to be defined by the creation of this new genre though.

“Friendslop” powered the arcade golden age, the rise of LAN parties, the explosion of online gaming, and countless beloved titles across every era. It enables talented solo devs and teams of three to rival the revenues of AAA, sending a clear message: 5-year 10K-head-count games are no longer profitable relative to the upstarts.

“Friendslop” will resurrect the industry in a healthier form: not dozens of mega-studios, but thousands of vibrant, creative AAA-caliber teams making games people actually love to play together.

The path forward isn’t chasing ever-larger scopes or more photorealistic graphics. It’s in rediscovering the joy of elegant systems, meaningful interaction, and shared human experiences.

Go forth and multiplay.