Two years ago, a multiplayer social deduction game was released by InnerSloth, but the developers did not have high expectations from it. Although it did get somewhat popular in Brazil and Korea, still it was hardly known in the United States. The fact that it was limited to mobile platforms, poor marketing by the InnerSloth team and local-only multiplayer seems to go against it, as it remained in obscurity for almost two years. But everything changed after a Twitch streamer started streaming it a few months back and it grew exponentially in popularity, first in the US and then worldwide. The game Among Us today has over 60 million active players, who are increasing every hour.
Among Us has taken the gaming industry by storm and has surprised everyone. It is hard to make sense of its sudden resurgence. Today it won’t be wrong to say Among Us can very well become the most popular game on the planet in a few months if it follows the trajectory of growth that it has set in the last few months. It is not new for indie games to go viral all of a sudden, what’s odd is Among Us remained dormant for almost two years and all of sudden we see something unprecedented. Today, it has over 75000 reviews on Steam and a very bright future ahead of it.
The developers of the game were shocked when they first saw a sudden rise in players. Among Us, infrastructure was not prepared to handle so many active players at the same time. One of the developers reported having worked 12 hours a day as they had to re-do systems in order to get more servers onboard and they did a great job as the game’s infrastructure improved significantly. Today it has millions of active players on the platform, and there are hardly any technical issues. The work that InnerSloth team has put in such a short time is commendable.
The three most important people who deserve most of the credit for the development of the game are – Amy Liu, who was mostly focused on working on the art, Willard was the primary coder for the game while Marcus Bromander worked as a designer and animator. In the first two dormant years, it was only Willard who looked at the day-to-day operations, which was not hard since the game didn’t have many daily users to require a bigger support team. The InnerSloth team surprisingly didn’t even have a professional office, and the team hardly saw each other in the development process. For the most part, all the work for the game was done remotely.
As the sudden rise of Among Us is making more and more news, the company seems to be getting popular with big companies as well. Earlier the game only had one big company that was interested in their work but now, they are drowning in offers from numerous other companies that are looking to strike a deal with the latest success in the gaming industry. The big companies, however, can’t be blamed as the surprising rise of Among Us is way beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Now InnerSloth is not getting offers just from big companies, but there are too many applicants that are hoping to join the game studio. The primary coder Willard has reportedly said that he receives tons of new portfolios every day. The company now has dozens of offers to translate the game in different languages. After spending years in obscurity, Among Us is now drowning in resources to use.
Willard makes the case that it is the simplicity of the design that had made the game so popular now. Anyone can learn its fundamentals in a few minutes. However, InnerSloth does have a Discord channel that has excellent gameplay suggestions for people who might prefer an extra level of complexity in the game. The developers are not looking to make considerable changes in the game as they prefer it the way it is.
As of now, the long-term goal for InnerSloth seems to be a sequel of the original game that will host the original one within it; this is something unheard of. Usually, when a studio finds success, it opts to stick with the original product with a few iterations, but InnerSloth seems to be going against the conventional advice. However, making little tweaks here, and there is extremely challenging since it is complicated to take care of all the elements that are connected together to make up the game; this usually forces the coders to work extra time on the game as they have to dig deep into the core code.
However, the game studio completely changed its initials plans of a sequel and decided not to push against the grain; this means that InnerSloth will work on integrating the latest updates of the sequel in the original game itself irrespective of how challenging that is going to be for them. Among Us seems to be doing everything right as of now and it is only a matter of time that it might even become the biggest game on the planet. It might sound exaggerated, but if someone had said that the game is going to have more than 60 million active users in 2019, no one would have believed it either.
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