gaming
Peak went from a canceled game that couldn’t get funding to selling millions on Steam
Discussion
Feels like a lot of these indie titles become YouTube sensations and get to be a flash in the pan, so to speak.
Not sure if that's good or not, but it's certainly interesting.
For what it's worth that 'flash in the pan' is the dream of every indie dev. It may be more than enough to fully recoup development costs and fund the studio's next title.
Lucky developers get a windfall, players get an enjoyable new experience, and a month or two later it happens again with a different game. Seems preferable to the AAA live service alternative.
Oh absolutely, but I can also see it as a potentially unhealthy goal for a budding indie dev to have. There's maybe 4 or 5 a year that get that, but thousands of games being made.
It's almost like working hard on something just for a lottery ticket, no doubt that's something that needs to be taken into consideration when investing yourself into a project.
Releasing an indie game and hoping to recoup the cost of development has been called a Lottery Ticket within indie circles for years. It's assumed to be that way.
Peak's cost of development was incredibly low. Per the article, it was made in about a month, and initial plans was just for it to be a short side product while the studio spins up ideas for their next bigger game.
Honestly I don't think 90% of game devs, indie or otherwise, are in the for the money. They're in it because they love games. The indie dev works on their passion project for years on end by themselves, the triple A game dev puts up with being underpaid by big companies and with layoffs an ever present threat.
The ones who are in it for the money and are there to make a name for themselves really don't get very far either .. or at least end up being stuck in their own little pockets (and for the better).
It's definitely an unhealthy model, but only because it's an improvement over the worse one that came before it. And supplementing a downright poisonous one.
If you want a stable job at a studio as a game developer, you pretty much have to build at least one pretty good game on your own first. Which also usually means several crappy games along the way.
In the past you'd be really lucky if ten strangers found it, and even if a ton did you probably couldn't profit on it easily. Or if you were really good and really lucky you might get a studio to publish it.
Now, the studio jobs are harder to get than ever. But in the meantime you can pretty reliably get a game in front of a hundred or so people, and a few thousand isn't too unusual. Even if it's only mildly popular you might be able to supplement your income a little through ads or mtx. If you can put out a few games, you get feedback and practice, and maybe even build an audience excited to give you money regularly. If you do win the lottery, you can land a studio gig, or you might even get to remain independent and do stuff you find fun.
Compared to game development at basically any other point in time it's a dream come true. If we could free up a bunch of the hoarded wealth from the studio system it might even be fantastic. Because that's the toxic part that requires this whole other lottery to sustain. If studios didn't treat their employees like livestock so people could actually get hired and keep jobs, we wouldn't need it. Or at least it would be a fun cottage industry on the side.
It does have some shades of the twitch streamer / YouTuber phenomena when it first got started. And Vtubers to a lesser extent now.
Lots and lots of people who see these cult personalities they enjoy playing games they love for a living, and of course everyone wants to do it, but it turns out to be a real roll of the dice as to who succeeds and who fails, because at the end of the day you’re kind of relying on going viral to succeed.
I worry there will be a crash there eventually in the indie dev scene, or else we’ll see what we have now with big influencer sponsorships and all the damage they’ve caused, worming their way into the indie dev scene. We already have enough problems with indie devs turning into big studios after they hit that one major success and then falling flat afterwards….
Lucky developers get a windfall,
These developers got a landfall
With the way that social media trends too with the likes of YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch being the backbone for a lot of income for content creators, there's absolutely no shortage of people looking for the next hidden gem to get big with and at the same time games that developers can make that hopefully ride and catch the wave to become part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Even when Phasmophobia came out back then, despite it being a novelty, there was absolutely no shortage of indie developers trying to cash in on making games that are "better" or "newer" than Phasmophobia to make big money .. and even the people who played Phasmophobia or were wanting to play horror games were busy looking for the next game to showcase so they could hopefully become content creators for the next big successful game (prestige for themselves and so on) and also rake in views and income from hopefully becoming viral.
A lot of the super-big games we see in the AA and AAA market don't really cater to this crowd of viewers and players and it's a bit too slow-moving to really find the "right time and place" sort of flash in the pan sort of phenomenon .. but they get something else instead when everyone knows it and wants to enjoy it on their own instead.
To be fair Peak’s devs already did some great games like another’s crab treasure and Going under
And Content Warning
another’s crab treasure
These are those guys? That's fun, I loved another crab's treasure.
Its extremely fun to play one or two runs with friends in a discord call, which is huge demographic of games as Lethal company and other trend games have shown in recent years.
Recommend trying it without discord and just in-game vc if you haven’t already. They do some fun stuff like when a teammate is far away or up high there’s an echo, also hearing their scream fade away when they fall to their death
Thats 100% true, and actually how i play it haha, but i still have folks in a discord call while muted lol.
For a game that was mostly made in a month, that is pretty damn good.
I appreciate it when the game is <$10. I feel like I've gotten a lot more value than most $40+ titles
I call them "Streamer games".
Games that get popular because a bunch of people are playing it on stream. Then they stop playing it within a week and the game's relevance falls off a cliff.
We've already moved on from PEAK. Now everyone's about that Anime Horse Racing game.
And I'm sure within a week they'll have all moved on from that.
Yeah, I'm happy when they end up being indie games from small teams, but I don't think it's very notable in the general sense when it happens to a game.
Like, the most notable and one of the longest standing examples is Among Us. Among Us is just a shameless copy of Werewolf. Unquestionably a fun party game/game to play with friends, but it's not doing anything groundbreaking.
It's traditionally called the "Flavor of the Month"
It does seem to happen when it's a product that delivers on a simple concept that feels good to play and was developed with fun being the priority
I said basically the same thing and ruffled some feathers apparently
Proximity chat is such an amazing addition in these type of games.
The physics based VOIP is phenomenal
Having peoples voices echo & reverberate off the environment you're in is so cool & feels very immersive
- the inevitable Doppler cry of anguish when someone falls
NOOOOOoooooo.... thud
Truly the best thing, watching your friend fall from high with the echo/reverb/doppler
co-op platformers is a genre that, like anything ever related to platforming throughout the history of time outside of a brief period in early 3D in the late 90s when it dominated, has been underutilized and tossed aside.
I'm not surprised at all one that looked decent got attention from streamers who are always looking for another FoTM multiplayer game to fuck around with in their friends.
Good for Peak and their devs.
It's cheap, social, and team oriented.
For $11(cdn), it's easy to drop down money for a night of fun. It's less than a movie ticket at that point
Exactly, bought three copies to play with the family, we had a blast
It's peak
Say that again...
These devs deserve the success. It's really fun with friends and the daily map changes always give you new paths to solve. It really feels like a unique genre that no game really did this way.
I doubt this is a game that you will pump 200+ hours into, but for $7 for will get some really fun evenings
I will say Landfall is kind of an anomaly for Indie devs. Ever since 2017, every game they released has been somewhat viral. Now some for a very few days/weeks, others still hold up today. I wonder how much of this game is Aggro Crab and how much of it was Landfall, I hope Aggro crab learned alot from this game and will also become a dev team that makes great games in the future.
Huh, I didn't really know what Landfall had made other than TABS, only to find out they did Stick Fight, Content Warning, Clustertruck, and now Peak? They do have a knack for making games that are fun, but make really good "content" too.
This is so peak!
It's a great game. The only thing I would want to change at the moment would be having the seeds be visible so you can try to finish a mountain you messed up on but didn't have time to start over and do it again because it was too late. Not even close to a dealbreaker but there have been a few days that I was bummed not finishing the mountain.
If there's a concern of badges or difficulty levels being farmed on specific seeds, just made anything that isn't the current day not count towards progress
That's peak gaming right there
looks amazing, just wish I had friends to play it with lol.
Goes to show that business isn't what makes good games. Its passion from developers that does.
And luck for it to be noticed by social media content creators
Partially but that wasn't really luck this game lends itself to that kinda of content and those kinds of content creators are desperate to find new content. It helps their view counts massively.
How long before we're drowning in shovel ware, asset flip, AI cover, knock offs with names like "Peak Mountain simulator 2025 Climbing challenge" by a dozen different scam developers in our game store pages....
I give it a week.
I love the game but the missing customization in controls and voice chat really stuck out sorely :/
Concerning the name:
“I’m pretty sure the pitch for Peak was as a joke over dinner at an Izakaya, where we kept saying ‘It’s Peak’ and eventually we just liked how Peak sounded,“ Drew says.
Lol, nice.
no couch co-op breaks my heart
I give it 2 more weeks until streamers move onto something else.
This is how limited scope games work. It's simple, fun, and affordable. There's nothing wrong with this model.
It is a $5-10 game with lots replayability - what's not to like about it?
Make a goofy looking game, make it super wacky so streamers can scream and go crazy while playing it, sell millions of copies. Control C, Control V
Is anything enjoyable to you? Like, seriously, do you find any joy in life?
Eh, it is a pattern. Not saying the games are bad, but their popularity comes quick, and disappears even quicker.
Yeah of course. Weird ass question to ask for no reason
slop is slop
slop
Fun
One of my favorite multiplayer games since lethal company. Its dope the map changes everyday and getting all the badges is a fun challenge. My buddy everyday after work tries to do 1 solo run to the top and he just sends me a picture of his death lmao. Games great
REPO has ruined Lethal Company for me
Lethal was so janky and a bit unfair. But it had a ton of charm.
Repo just feels like a more refined Lethal. The repo exploration is less scary though. Which I miss a bit.
Yeah I agree. REPO is just too goofy to be as scary as Lethal.
Than and the pitch black winding hallways full of whatever horrors your brain can imagine that are in Lethal are just not there in repo. :( I think you are right about the goof factor being too high for real scares
I find janky can be fun though, when games have no jank they just get boring for some reason
Nothing unexpected happens is probably why
My favorite thing about repo is that you can actually fight back against the monsters. LC was super jank with the swinging and stuff, and even then killing most enemies was super hard for no reward. Repo you can more reliably kill them, it’s way more fun to kill them, and you get a nice reward for doing so.
I’ve never found REPO very scary, and while the core gameplay of moving furniture is pretty funny, nothing has replaced Lethal Company in the ‘comedy game becomes a horror/drama movie’ department, peak getting pretty close.
REPO got very boring very fast compared to lethal for me.
Idk, I tried repo and didn’t have as much fun as lethal. We still play lethal every now and then, never touched repo after the first couple hours
The map layout actually rotates between 14 different seeds.
Wasn't always a big fan of new co-op games, but I feel pretty much the same way as you. First co-op game for me in the last 5 years was lethal company and it got me to play 100h there, and the second co-op game is peak, which I already played 50h.
Insanely good idea and nice implementation