How Peak sold 4.5m copies in less than a month…

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

We’re back at full tilt – and there’s plenty to talk about, even as the PC and console market complexifies (Is that a Bushism?) Anyhow, please don’t misunderestimate GameDiscoverCo, it’s time for textual goodness beamed to you down a series of tubes…

Before we start, the latest Mega64 (veteran Internet ‘skit’ folks!) video rules, because it’s about an important hotline for fans of Nintendo games. Can it be true that Nintendo doesn’t care about their lore being perfect? But… some people do, so… *hides*.

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Time to saunter around some notable game platform & discovery news tidbits, starting with the following:

• Looking at GDCo’s ‘trending’ unreleased Steam games by 7-day new follower velocity, from June 30 to July 7th (above), co-op pirate survival game Crosswind is #1 once again, and hit ~500,000 wishlists, with Korean-dev zombie extraction FPS The Midnight Walkers (#2) getting significant ‘tech test’ interest, esp. in China.

• The rest of the Top 5 are ‘frequent flyers’ (OKU, Subnautica 2, WUCHANG), but top-down action shooter Vaultbreakers (#6) rides its playtest and gameplay trailer up the charts, and EA’s Skate. (#7) also got a playtest bump. The only brand new entry for the week is Bellatores (#14), a medieval MMORPG with a closed beta.

• Arkane’s original co-founder Raphael Colantonio has been saying: “I think [Xbox] Game Pass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade.” He thinks a back catalog-led approach (as largely practiced by PlayStation Plus) is more sustainable in the long-term.

• Some interesting comments from porting experts Virtuos on Switch 2’s tech capabilities: “GPU-wise, the Switch 2 performs slightly below the [Xbox] Series S; this difference is more noticeable in handheld mode.” But the Switch 2 does DLSS, and since “the CPU just a bit more powerful than the PS4’s… Any game shipping at 60 FPS on the Series S should easily port to the Switch 2.”

• Did you, as a dev, get an email from ValvePublisherClassAction.com? As FIX Gaming explains, it’s real, a “court-authorized class action notice tied to [Wolfire’s] antitrust lawsuit against Valve”, and if you do nothing, you’re opted in to whatever settlement is – or isn’t – made for allegedly breaking ‘most favored nation’ rules.

• Another reverberation from the Xbox layoffs? This Polygon piece headlined ‘Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all’. It delves into deeper history (Lionhead! Bungie!) to suggest Xbox has “failed to find [a] line” between micromanaging and, latterly, being too hands-off.

• An interesting change in Chinese gov approvals, per Daniel Camilo: “Video games produced in Shanghai by international studios will be considered as national productions (Chinese)… This will, in theory, expedite the approval process for such games to get a publishing license for Mainland China.” (It’s def. most relevant for mobile games.)

• The Financial Times did a deep-dive on Steam conquering PC game platforms ($), even citing GDCo briefly. Nothing majorly new, but it’s well-compiled, and they did resurrect a ‘Steam profit per Valve employee’ estimate ($3.5m) from 2021 that was leaked in weird circumstances during discovery in the Wolfire lawsuit.

• Paleo Pines is trying a new angle for a Kickstarter, essentially ‘we released the game, can’t afford to update it regularly because the recoup/publisher royalty is insufficient, so we’re crowdfunding’. They’ve raised $137k from ~1,000 people so far, so it’s an interesting angle – there’s a lot of physical (dino plush!) deliverables, tho.

• An English translation of the Nintendo shareholder meeting Q&A (.PDF) is out, and president Shuntaro Furukawa is advocating for shorter, sharper games: “We… believe it is possible to develop game software with shorter development periods that still offer consumers a sense of novelty.” (He seems to be talking first-party, here?)

• Also neat in the Nintendo Q&A: Shigeru Miyamoto hyping their totally cool new external director candidate, flying machine inventor (!) Kazuhiko Hachiya, who “engages in unconventional activities”, ha. And it’s neat to hear from Illumination’s Chris Melandandri as a new board member – a rare, direct Western influence.

• Microlinks: PlayStation 5’s top downloads for June were topped by Death Stranding 2 in the U.S., and Rematch in Europe; the name, design, and key finger gestures of Meta’s smart glasses with a HUD and neural wristband have leaked; the Xbox Retro Classics app – cloud-powered by Antstream – hit 1m players.

It’s funny: a while back, we were considering covering Peak co-dev Aggro Crab’s video about pivoting away from a large project – a sequel to their first game, satirical dungeon crawler Going Under – and instead making two smaller, more dynamic games, to counter dev burnout. (Because it’s an interesting story around agility…)

But then the first of those projects, a collab with Landfall, co-op mountain climbing game Peak, shipped and Aggro Crab’s studio head Nick Kaman tells us it’s sold 4.5 million copies as of today, since its June 16th launch – at a $5-$8 price point. So now we definitely have to cover it, haha.

Before we start: GameDiscoverCo has previously talked to Aggro Crab about its ‘250k copies in a month’ goofy Souls-like Another Crab’s Treasure, and to Landfall about big hit Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and its experimental approach to new releases. (Since we wrote that, Landfall scored large with co-op hit Content Warning, too.)

So if you were to tell us a co-op game made by the two studios was a hit, we wouldn’t be that surprised. But still – Peak has gone bigger, quicker than anyone was expecting – heck, it’s still hitting 100,000 concurrents on Steam daily. So how? Let’s analyze:

• Peak was birthed from a ‘game jam’-styled offsite: Aggro Crab’s Kaman says 3 devs from Aggro Crab and 4 from Landfall met in Seoul for a month early in 2025, and after a similar ‘loose’ dev approach to Content Warning: “we basically just asked them if we could tag along this time, to see if lightning could strike twice.”

• But it was way more focused than an abstract jam: Nick explains: “I suppose what differentiates it from a jam is that we went into it with the sole intent of creating and shipping a commercially viable game in a very short timespan.” The teams worked quietly from home for the next several months, fleshing Peak out, before meeting up in Sweden for a final week-long push before release.

• Utilizing tech from the teams’ previous successes helped: Content Warning, which was Landfall’s clever twist on the Lethal Company ‘co-op mishaps’ formula, hit a peak (ha ha) of 200k CCU. And Nick notes: “Landfall’s technical aptitude at online co-op multiplayer and active ragdolls especially helped us get up to speed quickly.”

There are elements of Peak that echo that ‘Lethal Company-like’ microgenre – although Peak is very playable single-player, too. But it also diversifies and adds twists in several key areas. We’d point out the following:

• The stamina bar is the mechanic that the entire game is based on: Aggro Crab’s Nick explains of the central design anchor: “The main tension in the game’s mechanics is just a terrain to climb up, and the uniquely damageable stamina bar. That dynamic naturally led to basically every other feature in the game.”

• The game’s ‘uber’ stamina bar actually innovates: there’s been related mechanics before in Zelda, but this Eurogamer piece explains why Peak’s stamina bar (which depletes when you climb & replenishes when you don’t) works so well: “Peak’s system is endlessly adaptable… [backpack heaviness, poisoning & more] is captured in one meter, and you understand it absolutely the first time you see it.”

• Layering in co-op and proximity voice chat boosted the whole concept: by adding these, Nick explains: “we got to introduce mechanics that require teamwork like lending a helping hand, reviving each other, and constant communication to find the best route up the mountain.” The result combines a) “immersion” b) “silly roleplay opportunities”, and c) “genuine challenge you need to work together to overcome.”

Thus, as a positive Steam player review says: “The traversal challenge and environmental puzzle solving coupled with resource management gameplay loop of Peak is something I’ve wanted to see for a long time.” And it’s worth noting the game is also procedural – so the mountain to climb changes daily. (Another very smart step.)

But most of all, Peak is a genuine joy to watch other people play: ‘look, these influencers are having fun, I want to have fun too!’ is a giant part of the sales surge on Peak. When a player flexes with the Fortnite-styled emote system, or screams in voice chat and plummets to their ‘death’ – but can still hang in ghost form – it’s a blast.

Some other miscellaneous, but interesting points that came out when chatting to some of the creators of Peak:

• How the team made their pricing decision: being cheaper can extend reach, and Nick quips: “Content Warning was $8, so we figured this should be $8.” However, Content Warning was free for 24 hours at launch, but he adds “Valve advised us against this, as many since have tried it and failed to see the same success.” Still – to kick off early unit sales, the team discounted it to $5 for the first week.

• Pre-release ‘hype’ was not a high priority for Peak: Landfall has had a history of ‘stealth dropping’ games, and both studios have “existing platforms and playerbases”, so Nick notes: “We launched with 29,384 wishlists, with our first teaser and Steam Page going live, like, 4 days before launch.” It was all in the post-launch virality.

• Why this collab was more than the sum of the parts: The “clean design” of Peak made for a strong ‘what you do’, but Aggro Crab’s Nick adds: “We also have the angle of ‘who you are’: scouts trapped on a deserted island. There’s a synergy between those two angles that mirrors the strengths of our two studios!” We agree…

To end, here’s a handful of specific stats provided by Peak’s devs: the top players by country on Steam (in descending order) are the U.S., Russian Federation, U.K., China, Canada, Brazil, France, Australia, Germany, and Turkey. The median time played – as of mid-last week – was 3 hours and 53 minutes.

And here’s the Steam back-end unit sales curve for Peak as of latest Wednesday, when it had sold ~3.5m copies. So it’s added ~1m units in 7 days – not too shabby:

To end: once again, via David Taylor of Creator Games, a Roblox game publisher leveraging machine learning to invest early in breakout games (and who’s currently fundraising), we’ve got June 2025’s monthly chart [Google link] of the Top 20 top-grossing games, via the CreatorExchange metrics site. Thoughts:

• The Top 3 grossers are rock-solid – Grow A Garden, Rivals, Blox Fruits: that’s the same as May. The spread’s notable because Grow A Garden’s average CCU is >2m (wow!), but FPS Rivals managed #2 with ‘just’ 88k average CCU, thanks to premium weapon purchases. (Veteran action RPG Blox Fruits, at #3, has 211k.)

• Increasingly, Roblox success is about keener monetization over time: David Taylor tells us: “Blox Fruits engagement has declined by 80% since its peak around 1m CCU at the beginning of the year. The last time it was this low was August 2022. However, it’s been able to monetize at a much higher rate to offset the player decline.”

• The Strongest Battlegrounds is very, very One Punch Man-y: one weird phenom on Roblox is using licenses without permission. This is 100% the case for The Strongest Battlegrounds, a trad Roblox ‘fight, level up and punch other people into space’ game that’s One Punch Man-themed. It’s up 11 spots to #5 this month.

• The new entry? Of course it’s brainrot-themed: fresh at #11 in top-earning is Steal A Brainrot, with an average of 554,000 CCU & a high of 1.54m (wow, that’s big!) It takes the Italian brainrot memes and runs with it. Look, here’s a video explaining it all, and yes, you buy and steal brainrot pets like Bombadino Crocodillo from other players. (The stealing mechanic is kinda clever?)

It’s also worth looking at the Top 10 by minutes played (above), and seeing which titles are super popular, but undermonetize compared to playtime. Stalwart hit Brookhaven RP and Steal A Brainrot are higher up that list, as is ‘night-day’ survival crafter 99 Nights In The Forest, which looks… pretty fun, actually! Toodles…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]