A hide-and-seek indie hit has surpassed 15 million copies sold, as ‘friendslop’ proves you don’t need a massive budget to catch the world’s attention.
Games have always been better with friends but over recent years, the term ‘friendslop’ has come to define janky, low budget multiplayer titles largely designed for social media clips.
These games range from survival horror experiences like Lethal Company and the social deduction of Among Us to infuriating platformers like Chained Together and co-op climber Peak. They vary in quality, but one commonality is their reliance on streaming and online popularity to survive.
In 2026, the breakout title in this mould is Meccha Chameleon, a hide-and-seek game where you paint yourself to blend into the environment, in an attempt to deceive the opposing team hunting you down with guns.
Meccha Chameleon launched on Steam on June 10, and after less than a month, it has sold 15 million copies worldwide.
The announcement was made on the game’s Steam page on Sunday, July 5 and came with a tease for a ‘new collaboration with a famous Japanese star next week’.
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Meccha Chameleon was created in less than two months by two Japanese indie developers, Lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro. Even more astonishingly, it is now the best-selling game of 2026 so far, across PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam.
According to Alinea Analytics, Meccha Chameleon is the best-selling game of the year by copies sold, ahead of last year’s EA Sports FC 26 (9.1 million), Resident Evil Requiem (7.5 million), Forza Horizon 6 (7.4 million), Arc Raiders (7.4 million), and Slay The Spire 2 (7 million).
It’s important to note that Meccha Chameleon, priced at £5.29, isn’t the most profitable on this list (it’s the 18th highest game in terms of revenue on Steam this year, per Alinea), but it’s still a massive achievement for such a small budget release.
So how has this happened? Aside from being very cheap, Meccha Chameleon is massively popular on TikTok, with clips generating millions of views (this silly one of a painted Spider-Man has 5.2 million views).
Over the past 24 hours, it is the sixth most played game on Steam (via SteamDB), with a concurrent player peak of 194,899.
These games won’t be celebrated for their artistic merits during awards season (many of them don’t even have a Metacritic score), but there’s a broader lesson for the industry here. Games like Meccha Chameleon are proof you don’t need sky high budgets or high-tech graphics to capture people’s attention, just an accessible hook, a cheap price tag, and a high degree of shareability.
In some ways, friendslop is the closest equivalent gaming has to low budget horror movies. They’re often cheap thrills, but when they provide a reliably good social experience at the cinema, that everyone can talk about online afterwards, their success is easy to understand.
Big name publishers have been obsessed for years with live service games but so far have made no real attempt to make bigger budget friendslop games. That is also similar to Hollywood’s approach to horror films where the high profitability is far less important to companies than the relatively low revenues.
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