How Among Us Took Over 2020
A 2018 indie game about space imposters became October's biggest entertainment story, fueled by streamers and pandemic boredom.
If you’d told me in January that the breakout game of the year would be a 2018 title nobody had heard of, made by a tiny studio called Innersloth, I’d have asked what you were smoking. And yet here we are: Among Us is everywhere, and October has apparently been its best month yet, with something like 7.3 million downloads and roughly $24.5 million in player spending in just those four weeks.
For anyone who’s spent the last few months offline, the premise is simple. A handful of crewmates run around a spaceship (or, in newer maps, a base) doing small tasks, while one or two players secretly play the imposter, sabotaging systems and picking people off one by one. When a body turns up, everyone gathers to argue, accuse, and vote someone out the airlock. Rounds run maybe five to ten minutes. Then you queue up and do it again.
Why now, though
The game’s been sitting on Steam and mobile app stores since 2018 with a small but steady player base. Nothing about the core game changed this year. What changed is that a handful of big streamers picked it up and it clicked instantly with an audience stuck at home. Sodapoppin, PewDiePie, Pokimane, and xQc all ran sessions with other creators, and watching a group of familiar personalities lie to each other’s faces turned out to be extremely good television, or whatever we’re calling Twitch and YouTube these days. The clips travel well too — a well-timed accusation or a flustered denial is a perfect thirty-second clip, which means the game markets itself constantly across social feeds even to people who’ve never opened it.
There’s also the practical fit. It’s cheap (free on mobile, a few dollars on PC), it’s cross-platform, and a round is short enough to slot into a work break or a lull in a group Discord call. Compare that to a 40-hour campaign or a multi-hour Dota match — Among Us asks for almost nothing and gives you an immediate social hook. With so many people doing school and work from home and starved for group hangouts that aren’t just another video call, a game that’s basically a structured excuse to accuse your friends of murder has an obvious appeal.
What it says about the moment
I don’t think this is really a story about game design innovation — the social deduction genre goes back to games like Mafia and Werewolf, and Innersloth didn’t reinvent much mechanically. It’s more a story about distribution and timing. A cheap, low-friction, highly clippable game found an audience that had both the platform (streaming) and the need (isolation, video-call fatigue) to make it spread fast. The developers, from what’s been reported, weren’t expecting anything close to this and are reportedly still a tiny team trying to keep servers up under the load.
Whether this has staying power into next year or fades once people go back to offices and classrooms is anyone’s guess. Right now, though, it’s hard to open Twitter or Twitch without tripping over an imposter round in progress, and $24.5 million in a single month for a three-dollar mobile game is not a number you see very often.