Dozens of games were shown at Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase earlier this month, but only one featured a crab going out in search of a treasure, a clawed sword, and facing the underwater world. The Switch game in question, Another Crab’s Treasure, sounded perfectly niche, but its Aggro Crab developers presented it as “sold out”. They were only half joking.
“Earlier, Aggro Crab released Going Under and it didn’t make us rich, so this time we’re selling and giving people what they want: crabs,” one of the designers, Caelan Pollock, said during the Nintendo Showcase. The study described Another Crab’s Treasure as a 3D soul in which players level up by fighting other crabs and stealing their trash for use as armor.
The punchline was the ironic setup of the team for its latest revelation, but it also contained a bit of truth. “‘ Exhausted ’is jokingly said in our ad video, but we really hope this game can become more popular and attract new fans to the fold,” Pollock told Kotaku in an instant message.
Soulslikes can be great sellers, and crabs are a perfect vehicle for this steam bait formula, according to the thought. “When I say ‘mainstream’, I mean it’s hot right now!” said Pollock. “Elden Ring has successfully attracted a lot of new attention to the genre, both in the form of new players and many people who would like to play but are hampered by their difficulty or oppressive atmosphere.”
Going Under was a 2020 roguelike about doing an internship at a Soylent-themed startup and fighting the absurd and numbing excesses of capitalism. It was fun, clever, but not as successful as some stylish independent roguelikes have done. He found a publisher on Team17 and also made a Game Pass deal. Eventually, however, the money ran out and the future DLC had to be canceled.
“I want to acknowledge that even having a game funded and released, not to mention this game well enough to propel us to a second project, puts us among the luckiest 5% of independent developers,” Pollock told Kotaku. At the same time, having successfully done so as an independent game developer, Aggro Crab now maintains a team of over 10 people and the goalposts have moved.
“We had to move on to the next big thing if we wanted to keep the lights on,” he said. “And we really hope that’s the next big thing. Another Crab’s Treasure is a big step forward in Going Under’s ambition, and we want to show that Aggro Crab is capable of growing beyond our niche and creating a real-world game.” .
Amid ongoing debate over whether subscription games like Xbox Game Pass are sustainable in the long run, the excess of big games flooding every month in stores like Steam and the Switch eShop has also increased the stakes of discovery and success. “There are so many good quality games on the market that it’s hard to accumulate‘ hype ’for every game today,” GameDiscoverCo author Simon Carless wrote on GamesIndustry.biz yesterday. “This is an independent and independent Game Pass issue.”
Pollock hopes that Another Crab’s Treasure will “sell” where Going Under could not, in part, take advantage of the genre’s popularity with innovative difficulty settings. Aggro Crab pursues this difficult middle ground between making a game accessible to everyone and at the same time preserving the high-level Soulslike game for those who are so interested. But the team is not yet ready to share more about it, he said. The game is currently scheduled for Switch in 2023, and with private investment through the Kowloon Nights game funding set, the studio has the funding it needs until then.