Peak interview

"I just want to get the quote right. It’s by Sonic the Hedgehog.” An eye-opening conversation with one of the makers of one of 2025's top video games.

Peak. Screenshot: Team PEAK (Aggro Crab + Landfall)

Nick Kaman, co-creator of one of 2025’s most successful games, has a theory about video game prices and what those prices actually feel like to me or you.

Or maybe his theory is more of a joke about game prices.

He did classify it as a “joke,” when we recently spoke in Los Angeles ahead of The Game Awards.

But even a joke can be insightful. And Kaman, who co-created the co-op mountain-climbing game Peak, a game that sold more than 10 million copies in 2025, is probably worth taking seriously.

A little bit of set-up is needed: Peak launched last June for $5, a reduced price ahead of its standard listing of $8. That $8 price was based on the regular price for 2024’s Content Warning, a multiplayer comedy/horror hit from Swedish studio Landfall. In recent years, Kaman and some colleagues at his Seattle-based studio, Aggro Crab, had become friends with the Landfall folks. In February 2025, members of both studios spent a few weeks in South Korea creating Peak together. At one point, they discussed what to charge for it.

“We had this joke of, like, how much is a game really?” Kaman told me, as we chatted last month.

“In a player’s mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that’s five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that’s still five bucks.

“Four bucks is also kind of five bucks,” he continued. “Three bucks is two bucks. And two bucks is basically free.

“So we’ve got these tiers: You know, twelve bucks… that’s ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks.

“And we found that eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn’t become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right?

“So, eight bucks going to five bucks is the biggest differential we could find in pricing, so we found it very optimal.”

If you don’t fully follow that, well, maybe read it again. Do your best to wrap your head around it, because Aggro Crab and Landfall had a rare success story in a very difficult time for gaming. They just might be on to something.

For Kaman, 2025 was also a year of epiphanies and changed thinking (and a brief Pokémon-inspired flirtation with releasing Peak as two games).