There aren't very many games industry successes that look like Peak, the comedic co-op climber developed as a collaboration between indie studios Aggro Crab and Landfall during a manic month-long game jam in a Korean Airbnb. Less than a week after launch, it's already made over a million sales. For lead devs at both studios, Peak is a clear lesson: Shorter is often better, especially when you're dealing with burnout.
Before Aggro Crab and Landfall dispatched their devs to Korea for their game jam collab, the studios had been iterating on Peak's core concept for months. Aggro Crab creative director Caelan Rashby-Pollock said the game initially looked "much closer to an open-world survival thingy," but Landfall's collaborators urged the team to tighten its scope.
"Between then and February, we had a ton of conversations online refining the concept. Wilhelm and the other Landfallers pushed super hard to focus on a single tight core mechanic: the first person climbing," Rashby-Pollock said. "It was clearly the right idea! We ended up scaling the island down dramatically from our original plans, and spent more of our limited time developing ways for scouts to collaborate (or mess with each other) in interesting ways on their way up the mountain."
That smaller scale was a first for Aggro Crab, but head of community marketing Paige Wilson said it's already informed how the studio will be working in the future.
"Another Crab’s Treasure was a 3+ year development and marketing cycle. Our first title, Going Under, was similar. Needless to say, Peak felt like a speedrun of that entire process, but it was something we really needed," Wilson said. "We suffered a lot of burnout from working on the previous project for so long, and doing a smaller scoped project gave us a good refresh that gave us our spark back. The realization that smaller projects like this can work has set our studio in a new direction that we’re all really excited about."
It's a sentiment we've seen echoed elsewhere in the games industry, where development horror stories like Dragon Age: The Veilguard have shown how sprawling, interminable development cycles at big budget publishers wreak havoc on studios and their staff. Meanwhile, Kepler Interactive portfolio director Matthew Handrahan credits the publisher's success with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to its deliberately constrained scale.
The words of a certain hedgehog seem wiser every day.
For Landfall, the immediate response to Peak's launch is only further proof that it works best with a tighter scope. Landfall head of community said that the studio's longer projects, like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Haste—both of which took around three years of development—strain the team's focus and interest.
"In contrast, shorter projects like Stick Fight (two months), Content Warning (six weeks) and Rounds (five months) have been much smoother experiences for us," Fogelberg said. "Even if we’re super happy with both TABS and Haste as games, we want to mostly make smaller projects moving forward, with clearer scopes and shorter development times."
Still, even though Landfall is familiar with how well a smaller project can take off on release, Peak launched with a louder bang than Landfall CEO Wilhelm Nylund expected.
"Oh, it's f***ing insane," Nylund said.
Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kaman agreed.
"Basically what he said. We've had past successes but nothing like this. As of now the numbers just keep growing. The charts on the Steam backend are forming shapes neither of us have ever seen," Kaman said. "The best part is that it's proof that the collaboration was a success. Landfall’s excellence at designing fun mechanics combined with our sense for worldbuilding created something that neither of us could have done alone. Something Peak."
