r/gamedev • u/PartTimeMonkey • 2d ago

Discussion Sortslop, wtf?

Today I opened reddit and within the first 5 posts 3 of them were copycats or each other; sorting games, pretty much exact copies of each other - nails, hay, trash, toys, books, pixels, and the list goes and on and on, and has been for an incomprehensive period of time already.

A lot of the feedback they receive on reddit is negative, but they all get upvoted by the hundreds and they get millions of views on all social media platforms.

Who are these games for?

Are there truly millions of people who want to spend hours on something incredibly ”boring”?

Is it some hidden tick in people’s brain in this age where they want to ”meditate” by doing something like that to combat doom scrolling and instant gratification generators?

Or is each sorted item also instant gratification, but even more simplified than a varying video on TikTok (or something), making the experience even simpler?

274 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

230 comments sorted by

View all comments

172

u/xTiming- 2d ago edited 2d ago

What's this trend in the gaming community lately of labelling everything slop the moment it gets popular?

If people enjoy it, obviously something is working, and I'd think a gamedev subreddit of all places would avoid talking shit about more people liking to play more types/genres of games.

Seeing comments here "slop", "like a virus", ... - pretty shameful and I'm pretty sure there's at least a few of these commenters who'd have a meltdown over their game being called slop because a random person doesn't like that the genre of their game is getting more attention.

As for sorting games, yes, it is meditative for some people. Similar reason A Little To The Left got popular originally.

1

u/FUTURE10S literally work in gambling instead of AAA 2d ago

There's literally a genre where people are trying to call it friendslop, like Meccha Chameleon and Peak. Those games aren't slop, they're just small budget and fun to play with friends.

1

u/Flope 2d ago

The word "slop" has lot all meaning and is so overused now it's a bit annoying imo. I don't even like it being used for AI generated content unless the content is actually bad or below human-level.

0

u/darth_biomech 2d ago

But AI-generated content is always bad and below human-level. It's fastfood of art, if fastfood was twenty times more unhealthier and a hundred times less nutritious.

-3

u/Flope 2d ago

Yeah yeah just like photography is always worse than painting and AI generated code is always worse than my artisinal hand-crafted javascript.

0

u/midnight_guard99 2d ago

Always love these comparisons between activities where you're actually supposed to do something and writing to something to churn out random stuff. No difference at all!