Another ''friendslop'' challenger enters the Steam arena

Dear Passengers is giving Ryanair a run for its money, tasking players with running the world’s worst airline. The game puts players in the shoes of an airline crew onboard a collapsing plane, forcing players to work together to manage a rapid-fire sequence of absurd crises and disasters – or hilariously not manage.

Dear Passengers is the kind of goofy, physics-based, co-op chaos that’s helped the so-called “friendslop” genre thrive over the past couple of years. Propelled by a bonkers announcement trailer, Dear Passengers is already racking up millions of views across TikTok and X.

Dear Passengers hasn’t leveraged any paid marketing, creators, nor ads. This isn’t mobile over here (more on that later). It’s all been organic hype, translating into a massive milestone. Dear Passengers has flown past 1M wishlists on Steam.

Now, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you might ask: “Aren’t you always banging on about how wishlists are a vanity metric that rarely converts?” That’s absolutely true for traditional AA and AAA games. But when a game targets the ultra-low-price bracket, it’s a different conversation.

To understand how these 1M+ wishlists will translate into day-one sales, let’s look at our estimates for wishlist-to-buyer conversion rates for successful ‘’friendslop’’ titles:

• R.E.P.O. was sitting on about 163K wishlists at launch. It converted a massive 38% of them into buyers by day 7, climbing to 64% by day 30. It launched at an accessible $7.99 before bumping its price up a bit after gaining viral momentum.

• Meccha Chameleon entered the market with 378K pre-launch wishlists, as per our estimates. It converted 21% within a week, reaching 38% by day 30. It utilised a similar step-up pricing strategy, launching at $4.99 and moving to $5.99 within seven days.

• RV There Yet? had 271K launch wishlists, converting 34% by day 7 and hitting 40% at Day 30. It started at $6.99 and adjusted to $7.99 a week later. Seeing a pattern?

Cheap games convert wishlisters very well. It’s pretty obvious when you say it out loud, but when you look at premium, higher-priced releases, the contrast is stark.

Below is a freebie from our recent client-exclusive newsletter showing how premium 2026 titles convert their lists:

The data speaks for itself, but I’ll speak a bit too:

• For a $70 flagship like Resident Evil Requiem (6% D7 conversion) or Forza Horizon 6 (3% D7 conversion), a wishlist is merely the starting point of a long, calculated deliberation that usually ends in “I’ll wait for a discount.”

• For a $7 game, a wishlist is an impulse buy waiting to happen. The financial friction is basically bloody zero – even in this economy.

• For Dear Passengers, capitalising on this means launching with a deliberate pricing strategy. Coming in hot at an introductory $5.99 or $6.99 before stepping the price up a week later is the proven playbook.

• Pushing the base price above $10 out of the gate could severely blunt its launch velocity, especially since our platform metrics show that price-sensitive territories like Brazil and Russia account for some of Dear Passengers’ largest wishlist cohorts behind the US.

The audience primed to buy Dear Passengers isn’t a hypothetical one. These Steam players are active spenders in the genre. Our wishlister-to-player crossover estimates tell us quite a bit about Dear Passengers wishliters:

Nearly half of all Dear Passengers wishlisters already own R.E.P.O. (48%) and PEAK (47%), while over a third (37%) have played Meccha Chameleon. A quarter are actively playing Meccha this month.

Clearly, then, plenty of folks in the wishlist cohort are ready to add these kinds of games to their baskets, engaged co-op players hunting for their next group hangout.

As for why ‘’friendslop’’ commands such high player numbers, Nick Kaman – studio head and art director of Aggro Crab (one half of the Peak development team) – summarised part of it nicely in a press interview:

“There’s a real desire to connect and hang out in online worlds, and friendslop games put that at the front and centre of the experience,’’ Kaman told GamesRadar last year. ‘’These are games that emphasise teamwork and communication, as opposed to just testing your individual skill in a group setting.”

But as we said earlier, price is a massive factor, too. Convincing three mates to drop $70 – or even $40 – to try a new game is an uphill battle, especially during a cost-of-living crisis.

Talk your mates into spending $6 (the price of a decent coffee – not that those exist here in the Netherlands) to scream at each other in a crumbling plane for an evening is an incredibly easy sell, though.

When that frictionless entry point meets algorithmic social media syndication, the revenues can be pretty astronomical, as shown in this post from our CEO.

These games are generating premium returns on micro-budget development timelines.

How Dear Passengers came to be highlights a bit of a structural shift in indie development. It’s made by Flexus Games out of Ukraine, a studio of roughly 70 developers who spent years cutthroat-competing in the mobile market (mostly under publisher Casual Azur Games).

The mobile games Flexus made under Casual Azur have enjoyed millions upon millions of downloads, but mobile user-acquisition (UA) costs have turned into an absolute margin-destroying nightmare (due to platform privacy shifts and all that). So savvy mobile devs looking to make it without a publisher are eyeing up Steam.

I can see many more smaller mobile devs taking their existing asset libraries, retrofitting them into chaotic PC physics sandboxes (where possible), and letting organic TikTok and X algorithms act as their new, completely free UA engine.

UGC platforms like Roblox and UEFN are also shaking up traditional dev pipelines. To that end, Dear Passengers is remarkably similar to games (or are we still calling them eXpErIeNcEs) like Land or Die.

We saw this exact rapid-iteration cycle internally at a dev with Meccha Chameleon, which was rapidly prototyped in UEFN, community-tested, and exported directly to a highly lucrative Steam launch (now nearing $80M in gross revenue).

But it’s all too good to be true, right?

I don’t reckon so.

Publishers like Polden Publishing and Panic Stations (legends) are moving fast to institutionalise this trend, actively building out entire portfolios of high-energy, chaotic co-op simulations.

We’re currently in a classic gold-rush moment, though. Because these games are quick to prototype and relatively cheap to produce, the market will inevitably see an influx of low-effort clones, and plenty of late-arriving developers will go home empty-handed. We’ve seen it all before on Roblox and mobile.

I’m also waiting for the other shoe to drop: a predatory, free-to-play iteration of this formula that hooks players with a $0 price point and aggressively monetises cosmetics within the friend groups. I digress.

But as a structural genre, friendslop seems poised to be evergreen to me. Much like the roguelike boom before it, the systemic variety of themes you can apply to chaotic, physics-based teamwork still has a lot of potential. Social play is timeless.

Dear Passengers has the right theme, an incredibly hot wishlist funnel, and perfect market timing for a late-summer breakout. If Flexus nails the impulse-pricing window, they’re cleared for a proper takeoff.

We’ll be tracking the launch data, regional pricing skews, and initial week-one conversion rates as soon as the game drops later this year. Hit subscribe below to get that delivered straight to your inbox when the time comes.

• We just got back from Develop in Brighton, but we’re already a little over a month away from gamescom! So if you’re going and fancy a chat, let us know!

• Speaking of Develop, thanks to all of you who came up to us with kind words about the newsletter. It truly means a lot (that’s enough soppy shite for now, though).

• We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply right here on Substack/email, and we’ll set you up.

Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.

[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]