Among Us has grown up after two years of quiet?

On Tuesday, October 13, 2020, the 2-year-old game Among Us started beta testing for a new update after more than a year with only a few small updates. With this update, developer Innersloth focuses on giving gamers a more enjoyable gameplay experience, including new features such as anonymous voting, adding hidden quests, and additional gameplay. color blindness .

The birth of it is nothing difficult to understand, because Among Us is one of the phenomena of the game village at this time, although the birth of Genshin Impact has somewhat directed the public's attention away from the game. .

But why has Among Us been surprisingly successful after nearly 2 years of launch? How did it jump up to being the most streamed game on Twitch in September, with Steam concurrent players surpassing GTA V at the time of its release, giving PUBG a smoker and many other achievements? TipsMake will give the answer to this question in the article below.

What is Among Us?

Among Us's gameplay is completely not difficult to understand. It is a simplified version of the Ghost Wolf game that groups of friends often play together at gatherings, and is known abroad by many other names such as Mafia, Werewolf, Trouble in Terrorist Town, The Resistance .

In this game, a group of crewmates will try to survive while trying to find an impostor among them, and vice versa, the imposter must sabotage the crew's efforts. There will be no rounds of gun skills or stats, only a mind that can help both sides fulfill their tasks.

And as one of those who used to play both a human and a werewolf in the offline conversations of an old company, I would like to confirm that this is an exciting but also very stressful game.

The larger the group of participants, the more fun and exciting the game is when you have to try to decide who you trust, or how you can avoid sin and throw it all over someone else's head. . Games like this are not really popular, but because COVID-19 is raging makes gatherings very difficult.

Streamer helps the game 'take off'

According to the information that TipsMake found, Among Us has always been very quiet since its release. According to data on SteamChart, from the time of its launch to January 2020, the game usually had less than 200 players at a time, and at its peak it was only nearly 700.

The game only shows signs of 'head-head' around the end of January when a streamer with the nickname SR_Kaif (136,000 followers on Twitch) regularly streams the game to about 2,000 of his audience.

In May, the number of players only surpassed 1,000 when two other major streamers, singsing and AdmiralBulldog, regularly broadcast the content of the game to its 1,300,000 followers.

Among Us started to become popular on Twitch, and a number of other streamers also jumped in. A group of 8 Korean streamer dominated the top 10 Among Us's top 10 streamers for a long time until August, and the efforts of these streamers (along with word of mouth from the community) pushed the number of players. Among Us up to 9,000 at the same time, creating momentum for a vot increase lasting almost 2 months later.

However, the person with the greatest merit in the success of Among Us is probably Sodapoppin, another famous streamer. Forest Willard, Innersloth's head of sales, says Sodapoppin was lured by Pluto (an employee of Twitch) to buy Among Us during a sale.

Sodapoppin often plays games with his friends and other streamers, so when he tried Among Us and enjoyed the game, this gamer immediately enticed a group of friends including xQc streamer, comedian Andy Milonakis and one League of Legends streamer enters.

In the role of a community game, Among Us immediately spread thanks to these streamer, when each of them enticed a group of acquaintances - maybe a streamer that could also be a fan - into the game.

Among Us spread in the League of Legends streamer community and then Hearthstone, and the launcher's success was built for Among Us to immediately take off. Even PewDiePie was also caught up in this spiral when many gamers said that they knew the game from watching PewDiePie.

By September 2020, the game witnessed an unprecedented success: on Google Play alone, the number of downloads of the game skyrocketed from 10 million to 100 million in the period from September 3 to September 21. 9/2020!

The success of the game also 'pays off' to the streamer, for example xQc becomes the most successful streamer Among Us when fans spend 11 million hours watching him play Among Us (and Fall Guys, Overwatch, Valorant) in the past 4 months, while the runner up auronplay got only 4 million hours.

Sodapoppin also has 631,000 hours of viewing time within 2 weeks after he discovered Among Us. Many other streamers enjoy similar success even to a lesser extent, for example Moi I saw viewership increase from 200 to 400 while streaming games on YouTube.

And other reasons

If you look back to 2020, we can easily see that there are two successful titles with many similarities: Fall Guys and Among Us. Both have very simple gameplay, easy to get to know and bold community - a no coincidence because COVID-19 makes many gamers in the world locked at home and unable to communicate with friends much. as expected.

These games are an opportunity for groups of friends to gather together, laugh and scream and do cat tricks safely, without having to worry about wearing masks or interacting with strangers.

The fact that the game has 'good' gameplay compared to other titles like Town of Salem (2014) or Werewolves Within (2016) also helps it conquer gamers who are hit by the textual interface and lengthy rules of the game. Wolf Man.

Instead of forcing gamers to sit next to each other in a circle like in real life - something that the two games I just mentioned do, Among Us adds many things that gamers can do in the process of between controversial phases and votes to kick people out, and even dead gamers can continue the game instead of just watching and waiting.

Besides, Among Us is also a very accessible game when it is sold for just $ 3 on Steam plus many language options such as Korean, Spanish, German, . 2D graphics super simple to help Among Us can operate on old PCs - something that Riot tries to do when creating a graphics background that many gamers criticize as outdated in Valorant.

Controlling the game is also incredibly easy, making it playable by both adults and children on PCs and phones. On mobile, Among Us is even free, but the ads that gamers on mobile platforms have seen have brought in a lot of money for Innersloth in the past few months.

Epilogue

Thus, Among Us is an attractive game, but born without time and sinking under countless other games. Fortunately, it took off thanks to a small group of streamers and helped developer Innersloth find success - a somewhat belated, yet worthwhile, success. Hopefully with this new funding, they will be able to overcome the backlog issues and make the game even more attractive.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 16 October 2020