The co-creator of Peak made an impassioned plea for indie devs to eschew traditional development systems that don’t work for them – and to chase the friendslop “fad” before it’s too late.
In a presentation at GDC last week, Nick Kaman, studio head at Peak co-dev Aggro Crab, said that the friendslop phenomenon, which was made in a matter of months and outperformed its joint devs’ wildest expectations, was “the most fun I’ve ever had making games.” In fact, Kaman said that the enjoyment he found in the development process – the subversive style of which was the main subject of his hour-long talk – “did more for me than the success of the game.”
The financial and mental payoff that resulted in, he said, brought him “to this realization – ‘why aren’t we making more games like this?'” Perhaps not everything is going to sell quite as well as Peak, but Kaman argued that “freedom of development feels so good, and gets such good results. So if you’re indie, don’t let what people say is the way to make games tell you how to make games.”
Finding new ways to work might have been the core part of Kaman’s message, but he also called on devs to “please, make friendslop games – before the fad dies!” As a developer whose work helped cement the idea of friendslop in the public consciousness, it’s no surprise that Kaman is one of the concept’s biggest cheerleaders.
Elsewhere in the panel, he asks “why are we hating on friendslop? […] what’s so bad about hanging out with your friends?” Whether he truly believes it’s a fad in danger of dying out isn’t clear – the mass popularity of these types of games dates back at least as far as Among Us – but the uptick in silly, multiplayer-focused games like Peak, RV Where Yet?, Content Warning and more over the past few years has been notable. Perhaps the trick to cutting through in an increasingly crowded genre is to simply price your game at exactly eight bucks.