Peak co-developer Aggro Crab, half of the game jam-born duo formed with Content Warning's Landfall, is over the moon to have sold 11 million copies of the hit co-op mountain climbing game, which was made in just a few months. Aggro Crab is also ecstatic to have recently crossed 100,000 wishlists on Steam for its next game, Crashout Crew, which was quietly simmering at a separate internal game jam team while millions shouted at their friends in Peak. It turns out the second album problem is a lot easier to avoid when you're happy doing your own thing.
It feels weird to call Crashout Crew a second album, as I told Aggro Crab community lead Paige Wilson and level designer Phillip Corrado in an interview, because the studio released many games before Peak. Another Crab's Treasure, in particular, was one of the best Soulslikes of its year. But Peak brought in so many people – a near-90-degree spike on the once-normal line graph of the studio's growth – that there's suddenly a lot of attention on what the team does next, especially when that isn't Peak 2. (Peak will continue to receive updates going forward.)
Crashout Crew is a different style of co-op chaos, a little more Overcooked and a little less sprawling, made by a totally separate team from Peak. Internally, Wilson says Aggro Crab, now about 13 devs strong, is just having fun making games and being weird, and doesn't need or expect another Peak. It may be easy to say after you have that financial cushion, but the story of Peak and Aggro Crab is a strong and painfully relevant case for sustainable game development, smaller projects, creative experiments, and not immediately scaling up in response to success. Much like Hollow Knight: Silksong, Crashout Crew has seen a small team find a hit and then work to preserve, not massively expand, the workflow they enjoy.
A different summit
"None of us expected Peak to do that well," Wilson recalls. "We were like, this is a good game. We really like this game. It'll do well. And then the graph kept going up and up, and we're like, okay, that's enough. Okay, that's enough! And then it kept going for a couple months, and we were like, all right, all right guys, I think we did a good job here."
"It was, I think, shocking," she continues, "but it's thankfully helped us have more leeway to, like Phil was saying, follow a bit more interests and self-interest. Because of the success of Peak, as a studio we're not having to be pitching to a bunch of publishers, and that really takes off a lot of stress of who we're catering to. So it's a lot of what fulfills our interest as a studio."
Right now, Aggro Crab is interested in tight games with short productions, as well as the proven player appetite for co-op-first games – "friendslop," a once-derogatory term that Wilson embraces with both arms, or more incisively, games where the mouths move. "We're very happy that we don't expect everyone from Peak to come play Crashout Crew," she stresses, but the overlap is there and there's more co-op fun to be had, as the game's popular Steam demo recently showed. The focus is on expressing the shared DNA that defines Aggro Crab through a range of games that can find and hold players beyond one big spike.
"We're not going to continually have a graph go up, and we're happy with the community that we're getting from it, and it's a completely different project and that's okay," Wilson says of these two games. It's okay if Crashout Crew "doesn't sell 11 million copies" like Peak has. Crashout Crew's pre-release stats are looking great for any normal indie game that's not being compared to Peak, and that's more than enough.
"I think having an expectation of games continuously having to go up on that graph is what adds to your pressure," she adds, neatly refuting the growth-at-all-costs mindset that has dominated, kneecapped, and frequently shuttered countless larger, often publicly traded game companies. Amid heavy consolidation and contraction across the industry, this has only become more transparently futile in recent years as such companies pursue infinite growth in a world with finite resources and a games market that matured years ago.
Corrado, who's been on Crashout Crew since its inception and watched the Peak boom essentially from VIP seats, is of a similar mind. He says Peak made him and the team feel "very secure as a studio," as it gave them "more time to just feel out Crashout Crew."
"I'm glad that we are just happy that we're going to make something cool, and we feel like we're going to have something fun. The positive response to the demo has been really nice in that I'm like, cool, people like this too. Whether or not that graph continues in any way or shape, being able to do these two things at the same time is very cool. And also, I'm excited to be able to make games in the future that interest us and are weirder.
"The graph will go down from Peak for this weirder game. There's no way that this audience, for this type of thing, will reach the scale of 'playing fun scout game with your friends where the mouths move and you can fall off of a mountain and the sound will fall away.' That is so beautiful and wide appeal, but also inside our studio are a bunch of things that speak to us very deeply that I'm just like, that won't speak to nearly as many people as 'scout on mountain fall.'"
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