PEAK Dev Calls Out Roblox “Slop Ripoff” CLIFF, Clone Shuts Down
PEAK, the viral co-op climbing game that gained over a million players within two weeks of launch, now has to contend with a bare-faced clone. Roblox was playing host to CLIFF, a co-op climbing game with an almost identical art- and playstyle. The CLIFF devs have now responded and announced the game is being shut down.
PEAK is made by Landcrab, a joint venture by two indie studios: Aggro Crab and Landfall. It was made as part of a game jam in February this year, and released on Steam in June. It’s receiving regular updates with the devs, especially Aggro Crab, being active on X.
“tbh would rather you pirate our game than play this microtransaction-riddled Roblox slop ripoff,” they posted on Aug. 4, tagging Roblox in for good measure.
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The Sincerest Form of Flattery
CLIFF is made by PewStudio, which has two other games to its name on Roblox, and has an extremely similar summary to PEAK. Although PewStudio openly acknowledges PEAK as an inspiration, it hasn’t done enough to distance itself from the source material and is pulling the plug.
“Upon the request of you and the creators of the games that inspired us, we have decided to shut down our game completely,” the developer and founder of PewStudio, GKN, announced on his official Discord server, on Aug. 5.
“We are developers who respect everyone’s rights. Our only wish is that those making this request show the same stance toward other inspired games that are played ten times more and resemble the originals ten times more than ours. Thank you all for your support. You will receive your payments back in another game, which I will announce very soon.”
A License to Create Whatever You Want
Roblox is one of the most popular game engines around, with a recent report from Statista noting that it has 20.6 million daily active users in the US and Canada. Somewhat ironically, it also recently launched a new scheme that allows Creators to legally make games using existing licences, with its current roster including brands linked with Netflix and Sega.
However, its marketplace is still littered with clones, homages, and other unlicensed rip-offs, from Squid Game titles to others that copy PEAK, such as Climb, The Peak, and even one straight-up called Peak. CLIFF also isn’t the only one to directly rip-off Landcrab’s game, either.
Neither Aggro Crab nor Landfall have commented on these other clones as of yet, although Aggro Crab did recently respond to a follower who asked, instead of pirating PEAK, if they could have a Steam key instead.
“Fuck it why not,” Aggro Crab replied, with a code. Unfortunately, the person who requested it had it “yoinked” by another user before they could get it.
