Peak, the co-operative climbing adventure from Aggro Crab and Landfall, has become one of the year’s breakout success stories.
The title was announced and launched in the space of a week and went on to sell 100,000 units in 24 hours. It crossed 1 million sales a few days later and hasn’t looked back.
That would be notable in itself, but what’s truly fascinating about Peak is how it was billed as a “side hustle” by Aggro Crab and Landfall, who you might recognize as the studios behind Another Crab’s Treasure and Content Warning, respectively.
For Aggro Crab in particular, Peak was the result of a very conscious decision to pivot away from larger projects in a bid to stave off burnout and ditch the need for external financing.
It’s a call that has undeniably paid off given Peak has now topped 2 million sales, but how did both studio’s managed to deliver a hit in what feels like no time at all? We spoke to Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kaman to find out.
A viral hit made in South Korea
Kaman tells us that Peak took shape during a game jam between Aggro Crab and Landfall. It’s a tidbit both teams had already shared, but what we didn’t know is that the entire production essentially took place during a month-long retreat in Seoul. Three members of the Aggro Crab team flew out to the South Korean capital to meet with four Landfall staffers, mimicking the process Landfall undertook when developing its previous release Content Warning.
“Every waking moment was either working on the game or talking about the game over KBBQ and soju. We locked in. We did have to learn each other’s work styles. Like how [Landfall lead designer] Wilhelm types only the letter ‘f’ for every git commit message because ‘it’s the fastest key to press on the keyboard.’ Things like that,” says Kaman.
“Collaboration was very natural, which was something I had to get used to as someone who’s used to more rigorous production. People would just add whatever felt important or funny on a given day to the game, but with everyone’s level of experience, there was a lot of trust in each other that those decisions made sense.”
The vast majority of production took place during that four-week period starting in February 2025, which meant both teams were able to add polish “at a slower pace” when they touched back down on home soil.
Kaman explains there wasn’t the need for a hard budget because it was obvious Peak wouldn’t cost much compared to a traditional indie project. That said, he estimates Aggro Crab and Landfall spent less than $200,000 overall—which he notes is “pretty doable” for two studios.
“It was mainly just a couple months salaries and the Airbnb, flights, and food for Korea,” he adds. The biggest challenge, says Kaman, wasn’t financing or actually building the title, but rather agreeing on a direction for their initial concept. The team had taken to chatting over Discord before flying out to Korea, and that led to some combative discussions they’ve since come to blame on the fallibility of the written word.
“We knew we wanted to make a game about lost scouts but there were so many directions the mechanics were being pulled in. We got into a few arguments in Discord, worried that if we didn’t get it right, we would end up stuck in Korea making a bad game we didn’t really believe in,” he continues. “To our surprise, things clicked shortly after meeting up in person, where we figured out this is a game about free-form climbing and managing afflictions on your stamina bar. This led to a phrase we would say often: ‘text is evil.'”
“This level of attention has been completely unprecedented for us”
Scope creep is another evil familiar to most developers, but Kaman explains Aggro Crab and Landfall swerved the issue by agreeing they would ship whatever they made in Korea.
“To clarify, the game jam IS the game,” he explains. “By the end of the month, the core gameplay was basically done and all that was left was to hook up the rest of the user experience, add meta-progression elements, and sneak in the banana peel. We avoided scope creep by having a built-in ship date: midsummer. I’m here now in Sweden to visit Landfall for the annual Swedish celebration, and we spent the first week of the trip putting the finishing touches on the game and launching it.”
Once Peak was essentially in the bag, Aggro Crab and Landfall had to decide how to market and sell the title. That required both studios to place their trust in their community managers, who had spent years nurturing communities on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Steam.
“We knew we’d be able to reach our audience,” says Kaman, who explains the confidence both studios had in their community managers’ ability to connect with their playerbase was partly why they chose to unveil and launch Peak in the space of five days.
“You only really need to announce early to build up enough hype for that initial spark, but if you already know you’ll have that, then it’s just up to whether the game is good enough to turn that spark into a raging campfire,” he adds. “We couldn’t have predicted this insane of a response of course! I think the large launch discount (38 percent) and the inherent virality of the game also helped make it easy to convince your friends to all pick it up”
Image via Aggro Crab / Landfall
Discussing pricing in more detail, Kaman says launching for less than $5 made Peak a very tantalizing “impulse spend.” He explains that most players were pleasantly surprised at the scope and depth of the title considering the low price point and confirms the both studios subsequently broke even in a matter of hours.
“We thought if we were lucky it would eventually do half as well as Content Warning. We broke even in the first few hours. Now that a week has passed we’re at 1.6 million copies. It’s absolutely bonkers and none of us expected it,” Kaman continues. “We are freaking out. We knew we had a decent shot of success because of our platforms but this level of attention has been completely unprecedented for us. We’re attributing this win to the Power of Friendship.”
Indeed, this is the second viral hit Landfall has delivered after Content Warning, which sold 2.2 million copies and attracted 8.8. million players in two months. The reason for the discrepancy in those numbers is simple: Content Warning launched as a free-to-keep title for a full day. That lead to around 6.2 million people downloading the co-op horror title in 24 hours and over 200,000 concurrent users on Steam.
Landfall and Aggro Crab considered doing something similar with Peak, but ultimately decided it would be tough to replicate the success of Content Warning.
“We found out recently that a lot of games have tried [that same approach] since [Content Warning launched] and failed to hit the same level of success. We were anxious about whether we’d get results without a bold strategy like that, but this probably resulted in way more revenue than if we had done the free day,” notes Kaman.
As for how Landfall and Aggro Crab are sharing the spoils, Kaman explains both companies are taking cuts as co-publishers of the game. Each individual who worked on the project is also receiving their fair share. That sounds pretty peak to us.
