Peak put friendslop on the map in 2025, but neither of its 2 studios expected it to blow up: "We were ready to hit the launch button and go into vacation mode"

With 10 million copies sold and multiple major award wins under its belt already, Peak is arguably the biggest breakout hit of 2025. But look past the sales and the acclaim, and what makes the mountainous climb of this slapstick multiplayer experience so impressive is that this was not how things were supposed to go for Peak.

"At the end of the day we didn't launch with so so much of what we thought was required to make a hit," Nick Kaman explains. As studio head at Aggro Crab, one half of Peak's two-studio development team, he's familiar with those requirements, but confesses that several of them weren't really present for Peak. "We didn't spend a long time polishing it, and things like localization and console ports and media backing were all glossed over. We just wanted to get it out there."

Magic magic

Originally the product of a joint game jam, only four months passed between Peak's inception and its release in June. Within another week it had sold its first million copies.

Immediately, any plans Aggro Crab and Landfall had about what was coming next were abandoned. "When we flew to Sweden to release the game with the Landfall team, we were ready to hit the launch button and go into vacation mode," Kaman says. "That quickly became a pipe dream."

Suddenly, the lack of polish that had allowed Peak to come into existence so quickly became a problem. A growing playerbase led to a mountain of bugs to fix, and forced the two studios to start treating Peak "more like the big release that it is." But that's only been possible because of the nature of its two studios – Kaman explains that both teams had enough experience to pivot towards polishing Peak up, but also had to work to keep up its "jam-like spirit" as it worked towards its two major updates.

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Teamwork makes the dream work

Even if Peak hadn't been such a massive success, the circumstances behind its very existence remain a unique part of its story.

"I don't think it's something that's really been attempted before," Kaman says of the dual-studio approach that saw Landfall and Aggro Crab join forces. Having met at GDC, the two teams "quickly learned we had a lot in common when it comes to our development philosophies." After the success Landfall had with spoofy co-op horror game Content Warning, Aggro Crab "just kinda asked" about working together, and Peak was born.

"There's something really special about working with another studio on a game, you get to trade so much knowledge," Kaman continues. "You can highlight both teams' strengths and you can cover each other's weaknesses." While it worked for Aggro Crab and Landfall, however, Kaman warns that "I can't say with confidence that the success is easily replicable. You have to really be willing to let go of your studio's established way of doing things and just roll with the punches."

One way that both studios were already well-equipped to work in the same way, however, was in cultivating word-of-mouth around Peak. Both were used to speaking directly to their fans on social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok, so providing "the initial spark" to their "built-in audience" became a little easier. Kaman says that "99% of the marketing since then has been word of mouth or from content creators," but that was also firmly intentional. "Designing the game to be viral was kind of a no-brainer, it's not like we didn't know that adding a banana peel would get us more views."

While this particular studio duo has managed to make it work, the process wasn't always an easy climb. Even as the teams' combined efforts set to work on tackling those post-virality bugs, there were still a few issues to iron out; the 'ice age' that inflicted the same biome multiple days in a row after the Mesa update; the time an end-stage campfire spawned at the top of a (mostly) unscalable tree. The Peak team has been extremely open with these mistakes, in a move Kaman describes as "radical transparency."

"Ultimately we're just a small, scrappy team of humans trying our best and sometimes we mess up," he says. "If we can acknowledge it plainly or make a joke about it, we get a surprising amount of grace from the community. It shifts the narrative to one where you're in on the joke, and suddenly you're logging on to try and light the unreachable campfire."

Slopped up

But shifting the narrative doesn't solve every community issue, and Peak is inadvertently floating in an undercurrent of bad feeling.

'Friendslop' is not a new phenomenon to 2025 – Landfall had already dabbled in it with Content Warning, itself a spoof of much older games – but as this silly, social-first micro-genre has grown in popularity, so too has the backlash against it. But that backlash doesn't bother Kaman: "There's backlash because sometimes these games forego traditional quality markers like polished graphics or story, but these games aren't trying to be Game of the Year." As with any popular genre, "you get a lot of fast-follows and low-quality attempts flooding the storefronts," but he also argues that some of the negative feeling is rooted in the fact that "it's mainly just fun to be a hater."

A large part of friendslop's recent reach comes from the glut of streamer attention, the inherent virality of the comedy inherent to many of these games driving them into millions of social feeds. But Kaman says it's not just TikTok and Twitch that have brought players flocking to games like Peak.

"There's a real desire to connect and hang out in online worlds, and friendslop games put that at the front and center of the experience," he says. "These are games that emphasize teamwork and communication, as opposed to just testing your individual skill in a group setting."

Despite the fact that Peak and games like it eschew more traditional quality markers, the success and impact they're having can't be denied. But even after pivoting to make the most of their lightning in a bottle, its devs know it can't last forever. Kaman says that Aggro Crab is still "working on it basically full-time," but has a team wrapping up its next game, chaotic co-op forklifting game Crashout Crew.

He says there are no plans to join forces with Landfall again (even if he "wouldn't rule it out"), and that Peak's "not going to be a forever game." Instead, the two studios behind this surprising hit know that "we don't want to leave anything on the table. The game is making money so we could milk it for quite a while, but our goal is to get it to a point where we’ve done everything we’re excited about, and after that it’s on to the next one!"

See where Peak sits on our list of the best games of 2025 (if it's there at all...)