Meccha Chameleon pushed the combined concurrent peak for "friendslop" co-op games on Steam to 366,000 users in June 2026, up from a March 2025 high of roughly 280,000 driven by R.E.P.O., according to gaming marketing consultant Chris Zukowski.

The figures come from Zukowski's analysis on his blog How To Market A Game, where he argues the co-op-focused, often physics-driven multiplayer category is not oversaturated despite a steady climb in releases. "The games industry is a random, hit driven business," Zukowski wrote. "Don't just look at the top game... Instead look at HOW MANY other games earned a decent amount. Was it a fluke that one funky-looking game did well? Or is there a real trend there?"

How big is the friendslop audience right now?

Zukowski tracked the combined Steam concurrent user count across friendslop titles and found two clear peaks since the format's breakout. The first followed R.E.P.O.'s launch in March 2025, when the aggregate figure crossed 280,000 for the first time. Neither RV There Yet? nor Peak surpassed it during 2025. Meccha Chameleon's debut in June 2026 reset the ceiling at 366,000, and Zukowski wrote that a further jump is possible if a comparable release lands in late 2026 or 2027.

What does launch share actually look like?

By Zukowski's estimates, the top friendslop title at any given moment typically captures more than 50% of the niche's concurrent audience. That share falls to roughly 10% within three to nine months as players migrate to the next release. The pattern, he argued, is rotational rather than cannibalistic: the audience moves, it does not necessarily shrink.

Is the niche already too crowded?

Zukowski pushed back against the saturation argument using three reference categories. Since the start of 2026, Steam has hosted 67 battle royale releases, 785 RPG releases, and 1,087 incremental game releases. Each cohort, he noted, produced titles grossing around $4 million. He wrote that "a large number of games does not automatically mean there is no money to be made, just as a small number of games does not indicate an open market."

Which smaller friendslop still made money?

Mage Arena sat at the center of Zukowski's counter-evidence. At its peak, the title accounted for 11.75% of all Steam users in friendslop sessions — well below the niche's flagship games. It still moved 624,000 copies and generated $3.69 million in its debut week. Zukowski's framing: the bar for commercial viability in the category is lower than visibility metrics suggest, because players routinely cycle through releases instead of committing to a single live-service hub.

What should studios watch next?

Zukowski treats the combined concurrent total — currently anchored by Meccha Chameleon's 366,000 ceiling — as the cleanest read on whether the format is still expanding. The reference points for the back half of 2026 are whether any single release pushes the aggregate past that figure, and whether the three-to-nine-month rotation cadence he identified continues to hold. Studios weighing entry, he concluded, should treat friendslop as "a category with content-hungry gamers ready to switch to new games every few months," not as a saturated shelf.