Every December, a peculiar ritual unfolds across parts of the game development world: boxes of chocolates arrive from Valve. They’re not sent to every studio on Steam, nor even to every successful one. Instead, they go to developers whose games have crossed a quiet internal revenue threshold—rumored to be around $800,000 in earnings. The chocolates, often jokingly referred to as “Gaben candy,” are Valve’s low-key way of saying: you’ve made it.

For many developers, the chocolates are less about sugar and more about validation. Steam is famously hands-off, offering few personal signals of success beyond dashboards and sales graphs. So when a physical package shows up at the office, it’s a rare moment where the platform acknowledges the humans behind the numbers.

At the Seattle office shared by several indie studios, this tradition became a yearly spectacle. The team behind Slay the Spire reliably received their chocolates, cracking open the boxes while neighbors looked on. Among those neighbors were the folks at Aggro Crab, then still pre-Another Crab’s Treasure and pre-Peak. Each year, they watched from across the hall as the Slay the Spire team unwrapped their sweets—an edible reminder of commercial success just out of reach.

It was funny at first. Then motivating. Then, eventually, a little maddening.

By the time Aggro Crab was deep into development on Peak, the joke had worn thin. Seeing chocolates arrive elsewhere became a symbol of how close—and yet how far—they were from breaking through. Indie development already involves long timelines, financial uncertainty, and constant comparison. The annual chocolate delivery turned that abstract pressure into something tangible and visible.

When Peak finally succeeded, it wasn’t just about sales or reviews. It was about crossing an invisible line that Valve had quietly drawn years earlier. And somewhere along the way, the chocolates stopped being a joke. They became a milestone.

In an industry driven by digital storefronts and anonymous metrics, a simple box of candy ended up meaning far more than anyone at Valve probably intended.