149. Interdependency and "Friendslop"
Consumers want to play with friends, or better yet make new friends. This demand has been difficult to fulfil because game dev has traditionally been more reclusive than friendly.
I’ve been playing Mecharashi for the last 10 days. Steam says I have over 100 hours in but that’s exaggerated since I play turn based games in the background, especially if they have cool down timers like this title does. In attempting to determine who/where it was made, the results were murky. I’m assuming it is of Chinese origin and apparently there was some sort of lawsuit between them and Square Enix this year.
The game comes across as high quality, with really good voice acting and great visuals. It is turn based, which is smart because that appeals to older gamers and they still have money to spend on games. As I explained in my previous paper on the rerouting of the global economy , young men (traditionally the bread and butter of the gaming industry) are under extreme austerity which is only going to get worse.
While I think the gameplay is high quality, and I trust they have resolved their legal dispute for stealing assets paid for by Square Enix, there are metagame problems here that are critical. I understand that these elements have been used in Asia for decades but this appears to be a product aimed at the Western audience. Ten years ago these were obsolete, and by 2025 it’s gotten much worse.
Microtransaction Store
The Store is quite polished, and appears to be an evolution of standard Eastern mobile gaming monetisation methods. But it violates the rules set out in my 2012 Supremacy Goods that paved the way for the first Category 3 games in 2013-14. Those games are still some of the highest performing on the market. Thus Mecharashi is limping along with a Category 2 monetisation model, seriously inhibiting its ability to translate good gameplay into good spending.
The key failure predicted by Supremacy Goods is that there are too many options in the store, and they are for things that the player won’t even know what to do with. Player understanding might improve over time, but the game is unlikely to get the necessary retention for that because of its lack of Interdependency.
Interdependency
The Holy Grail of retention is a game that can successfully answer the question:
“If I don’t log into the game today, will anyone miss me?”
If the answer is yes, the player is much more likely to log in every day or even multiple times a day. This also implies that there are interdependencies built into the game. This means that a player can’t play through the entire game by themselves, they need the help of other people. This is the key element added by game economies, and I explain why in detail in my 2018 Game Economics Defined paper. If you don’t have interdependencies, then you don’t have a game economy. You have what I would call game budgets which are built by game accountants, not game economists. 99+% of the people in the world today that market themselves as game economists are actually game accountants, as there are no economies in their game designs.
Game economies create a social glue between players by allowing them to cooperate both in gameplay and in the metagame. Mecharashi has no economy (only budgets), no cooperative play, and no reason for a player to log in every day. But the game depends on players logging in every day and spending in order to be commercially viable. Even the element of being able to spend in front of other players, which often drives “peacock spending” in the East, is missing here.
That interdependent gameplay was the key element missing in my Category 4 World of Warships design. Leadership was well aware of this and it was the focus of my work at Wargaming my last year I was there. At least three titles with this characteristic were in the design or development stage, including Chris Taylor’s mega MMORTS which was greenlit with an advanced monetisation model of this type. I ended up leaving Wargaming because a nepotism hire with zero game dev experience, not in my chain of command, attempted to extort my work from me. He ended up losing his job also when he could not produce my work.
This concept of Interdependence is key to the Category 5 and 6 models I would later develop. Interdependency was also key to my Civilization Online meta design in 2013. Again, the 3rd party developer on the project told me point blank they were going to steal my tech during a meeting with me at Take 2’s Novato facility. This resulted in my departure and the cancelation of the project as the game became too high risk without my participation.
Mecharashi has really good gameplay. It would do well as a retail product if the Games as a Service (GaaS) mechanics were removed. But in 2025 any game launching with a GaaS Category 2 or 3 model is likely going to be Dead on Arrival (DOA). Reverting to retail is the easiest solution. They don’t have the post Cat 3 (or even post Cat 2 apparently) tech to make this a viable GaaS product, but if they did that would require a massive design overhaul.
You can see from the data that players are demanding more social and interdependent games. Gamers are running out of patience waiting for AAA to get the memo, so indie developers have stepped in. This new genre of inexpensive social games is called…
Friendslop
Gamers keep telling us what they want, and AAA keeps either ignoring their demands for more social games or they keep running into internal problems like the ones I just quickly recapped. Gamers have a reputation of not being that social because they don’t get out much and spend a lot more time with computers than with real space humans. Game developers are gamers, but even more like the stereotype. Thus making social games is hard for them because they don’t have a lot of real life experience to draw upon.
Still, independent developers have been experimenting with inexpensive projects that focus on cooperative play. Often it is some sort of cooperative survival game. The name that seems to stick when talking about this new genre is “Friendslop”. The slop comes from these games having pretty low budgets, but they have been hitting way above their weight class relative to their budgets due to the high unmet consumer demand for this sort of play.
I hold up Friendslop as proof that if we meet this unmet consumer demand, we as game developers will be rewarded. The greatest strength of Friendslop is also its greatest weakness: It’s cheap. As developers, slop and cheap kind of goes together. Making more refined games is expensive. But we still do, and in 2025 if we can’t make FriendGaaS (for lack of a better term), GaaS is going to reach the end of the line. And without the higher revenue generation of GaaS, it’s not going to be practical to make friendly games at higher than the “slop” level of quality. Sure perhaps someone could try, but if it was successful they would immediately be looking at ways to convert to GaaS to keep the revenue flowing.
What seems to be holding us back are:
AAA risk avoidance leading to iteration instead of innovation. But players are tired of what is being iterated and these products are being ratioed before they even make it to market now. So we have to move to the next technological paradigm.
Social is a very difficult concept for game developers, who rarely have team sports or similar backgrounds where they learn large group team behavior. This technological leap is going to come from people who have experience outside of game and business/financial development. Traditional social engineering is also not fun. Thus people raised in social engineering dependent cultures will have a difficult time innovating here. These products might even be illegal in their home country.
The propensity of using merit transfers (which I talk about here and here) is so pervasive in game development that it seems at least half of large projects today have enough stolen content to warrant lawsuits. Mecharashi is hardly unusual in that regard. You don’t hear about the worst cases because they get killed before they make it to market.
I think the merit transfers are being forced in large part because of the large number of nepotism hires in AAA and Hollywood. Indie studios can push back against this, and not having all that dead weight means they can put out higher quality product at lower development costs. Nepo hires will just increase as people “supplement” their skills by turning in undeclared AI content instead of producing things themselves.
Ultimately these are all leadership issues, but the wider technological, economic, and demographic changes (which are rapid) are not making leadership easy in this environment. As I talk about here, hiring legitimately qualified people isn’t going to get any easier either.
We know that GaaS is the way to make large projects profitable. But GaaS without interdependencies (and thus game economies) is a dead end. MMO’s built this way solve the biggest problem with Friendslop: a lot of people don’t have friends, or they want to play when their friends aren’t available. In a larger game where there may be 100+ players on your team, it’s a lot easier to have people be online when you are online. Thus the first studio to get past the aforementioned leadership and technology problems is going to make a lot of money.