cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8136414
Peak was one of the surprise successes of last year. What was originally meant as just a simple game jam project turned into a huge hit as hundreds of thousands of players gathered around the foot of the mountain with their friends with the aspirations of scaling it and escaping the deserted island.
Since then the game has gone through some updates and changes with the recent update adding a bunch of custom settings including an option to turn on “Grapple Mode (stupid)”, alongside an April Fool’s update that replaces the help reaction with a Spartan kick. But apparently not even Grapple Mode (stupid) isn’t enough for some players.
Because apparently three major updates, over 30 patches, nine hotfixes, and four minor updates is completely outrageous for a game that’s been out for less than a year, costs $8 (but is regularly on discount), and was made by two non-live service studios just trying to have a bit of fun.
“Peak has had sooo many updates tho,” one of the developers, Landfall replied. “Neither us or Aggro Crab are live service studios, any update is a bonus not a right. We just made a huge update for customising runs, but full customisation is a big ask. However if there are specific suggestions we’d love to hear them. [Redgarding] modding, we have a great connection with the modding community, when asking if we should add [a] workshop etc they didn’t want it.”
Good for them. You can’t have both a studio that’s creating new and innovative games and a studio that plans to endlessly update a single property at the same time. Do we want cool $8 games that are more fun than $60 games, or do we want bloated studios focused on games as IP for a live service focused development cycle? Because you can’t have both from the same team, and if you get a bloated enough studio to have both going on at once with separate teams you’re probably starting to get toward the size where it’s money people making the decisions.
If we want good games, we need to be centering people making good games, not some weird ever-growing virtual resorts where people order fancy drink dlc. This outlook shows that they have their priorities straight, and I’m hopeful to see what they make next.