The Story of Among Us, a Game That Changed the Way We Played

It was not long ago when nobody had heard of Among Us. Then suddenly it became impossible to avoid. Was it a spontaneous overnight success or was there something else to it? Today we're going to be looking at how Among Us avoided us all for almost two years before becoming one of the biggest games around.

Among Us initially released on June 15, 2018, and was created by a three person development team that called themselves Innersloth. The team was made up of Forest Willard the main programmer, Marcus Burrowmander the animator and designer and Amy Liu who was in charge of the art direction. The game was first launched on mobile devices before eventually releasing on PC three months later. It had cross-play multiplayer between both platforms but still only managed a grand total of 30 to 50 players per hour. Not the sort of launch you want for a game that plays best with 10 people. Despite this Innersloth continued to support Among Us constantly updating it sometimes even weekly while dipping into their savings. Eventually it developed an audience with players mainly from Brazil, Korea and the Middle East.

Large gaming YouTubers in those countries such as Kevin Choi created videos on the game from December 2018 to early 2019. This provided Among Us with its first big burst of popularity a boost which it desperately needed. Spiraling off the success Innersloth continued to provide frequent updates until Among Us reached a total of 1 million downloads in May 2019. Among Us had now become profitable with a huge active community entirely on mobile devices but their game's player base still averaged in the low hundreds on Steam.

To keep supporting Among Us Innersloth released two new maps MIRA HQ and Polus as paid DLC near the end of 2019. Both of which offered new ways of approaching and playing the game. Then on January 7th 2020 Innersloth posted a blog post celebrating the end of Among Us. It was a solemn post about how in the team's view the game was a great success, and it was finished. The game's player count had been decreasing for the past four months on Steam, and they decided to announce they were going to make the DLC free. The post then ended with how the development team would be leaving to work on all new projects.

That is until a British YouTuber named Cave made a YouTube video on Among Us the very next day titled "Local Idiot Gets Entire Team Killed". Cave's videos drew a lot of attention. It was an edited compilation taken from his Twitch stream playing Among us with a group of friends. Despite having around 450,000 subscribers at the time his video managed to reach over a million views by May and today stands at over 2 million. After releasing the video Cave continued to play Among Us regularly all the way up till today. Shortly after the video came out the peak player count of Among Us almost tripled on Steam. The game's lead programmer Forrest guessed that this wasn't a coincidence and that Cave's video actually advertised the game to a brand new audience most of whom likely had never come across the game before.

Valve saw this attention being drawn to Among Us and contacted Innersloth asking if they'd like to put their game on sale as a daily deal. Despite the name of the program, the esteemed daily deal actually goes on sale for the next 48 hours. Steam then pushes the game to the front page of their store where thousands of new potential buyers can now discover the game for the first time. Innersloth agreed and Among Us was put on sale at half price. According to Forest each of those two days produced an entire month of sales. After the deal had ended Innersloth noticed their sales had dropped but had not returned to normal. People were still buying Among us at a much higher rate than they were before. The game's average player count had begun growing on Steam again very slowly, but it was after months of it decreasing.

That takes us to May 7th 2020 where Swedish former DOTA 2 Pro Admiral Bulldog played the game for the first time. Bulldog had built an international fanbase off his career in the DOTA 2 scene after playing for Alliance and winning Valve's prestigious tournament in 2013. Then he built a community of over 700,000 followers on Twitch. His total watch time in May for Among Us was over 63,000 hours exposing it to a whole new audience. Other large streamers in the DOTA 2 community discovered the game soon after and started to stream it as well. This had a noticeable effect on the sales of the game.

Among Us jumped from around 1,200 peak players to almost 3,000 by the start of June. Around this time Steam began preparing for its annual summer sale. It's difficult to accurately express just how much hype there is around the Steam summer sale every year. Almost every game on the store goes on sale. Far more games are bought and played during this two-week period on Steam than any other time. Developers can't afford to ignore it especially indie ones.

In 2020 the Steam summer sale would run from June 25th to July 9th conveniently almost immediately after streamers like Bulldog drew attention to Among Us. Despite the rise in interest Innersloth chose to put the game on its biggest price cut yet. At 75% off the game cost only $1.24. A smart choice since it pushed the game into one of the top sellers on Steam. By June 29th the game reached almost 7,000 for its peak player count and was still continuing to grow from May 2020 to July 10th. After that we all know how things have turned out for this small indie made by a team of three people which came to define the year that was 2020.