Steam’s Most Surprising Co-op Hit Proves One Hated Gaming Genre Actually Works​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A week before it launched, players hadn’t even heard of Peak, by developers Aggro Crab and Landfall. But now, following its June 12 announcement and June 18 launch, Peak is sitting at 2 million copies sold in just nine days, a feat that would be impressive for plenty of titles, let alone a niche co-op game made primarily in a month-long game jam.

“Landfall’s Content Warning was made with the same strategy,” Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kaman tells Inverse. “And having been burnt out from the release of Another Crab’s Treasure, which was a three-plus-year project, we wanted to try something wildly different in production style.”

That wildly different approach meant teams from both Landfall and Aggro Crab meeting in Seoul, South Korea. Kaman jokes that he started the game jam out of “jealousy,” over seeing Landfall’s past game outsell his own.

“It’s cold as hell there in February so there’s nothing to do but stay inside all day and work,” Kaman says. “The internet is good, the food is amazing, and it’s roughly halfway between Stockholm and Seattle.”

Landfall’s Content Warning is a co-op horror game, but Aggro Crab’s Another Crab’s Treasure and Going Under are both singleplayer games, so going the multiplayer route was also a new venture for some of the team. Rather than making a competitive game, which tend to be the dominant mode of play online, the combined team (which calls itself Landcrab) opted to make a co-op game with a low-key hangout vibe, an emerging genre of its own that some of the more annoying corners of the internet have dubbed “friendslop.”

“After making Peak is when I realized that there actually aren’t really games like it in the online co-op genre,” Kaman says. “There’s a new term for this genre circulating online, ‘friendslop,’ which is a seemingly derogatory way to describe these games as low effort, cash grabs, and lacking substance other than providing a scaffold to goof around with your friends. But we wear the term as a badge of honor. Isn’t it a great thing to goof around with your friends?”

Made largely in a month, Peak hasn’t had a flawless launch, with early players having trouble even connecting to lobbies, and a persistent bug that caused crashes in one of the game’s stages and ended up being caused by the grass there.

“For now, grass will be disabled but maybe in the future we can properly reintroduce it,” reads an update on the game’s Steam page.

Bugs aside, the game has already proven that an offbeat game made under unorthodox connections can work, despite or maybe due to not looking like anything else out there. The game was made for under $200,000, Kaman told Game Developer, though the production schedule he laid out is not one other teams should see as a model.

“Every waking moment was either working on the game or talking about the game over KBBQ and soju,” he said. “We locked in.”

After what sounds like a grueling month of development, Landcrab put final touches on the game at a slower pace, though given that both Landfall and Aggro Crab are small studios, they’re careful about promising too much and not being able to deliver.

“Possible updates might range from quality of life features to new content and all the funny additions that we wished to make real from the start,” Landcrab wrote on Steam, and Kaman himself isn’t letting anything else slip.

“My team will kill me if I say more,” he tells Inverse.

Whatever is next for Peak, Kaman and the Landcrab team are proud of what they’ve made so far.

“I think Peak proves that the ‘friendslop’ genre actually has a lot of room for innovation,” Kaman says. “We’re actually pretty excited now to keep exploring different things in the genre moving forward.”

Peak is on Steam.