| Hi everyone, It's Jason. Unless you've been been stranded on a spaceship for the past year, you've probably heard of, if not played, Among Us. The social video game, in which a crew of space travelers must cooperate to sniff out impostors on their ship, was played by nearly 500 million people a month, or about 6.5% of the entire world's population, by November, according to Nielsen's SuperData.
Such success caught the small, indie studio InnerSloth by surprise, since the game had actually been around for about two years by then. The three college friends who developed the hit are now working frantically to keep it fresh. Originally, the team planned to make an Among Us sequel. But that was before it went off the charts. Such success meant that a follow-up game could split their player base in half, with some migrating to Among Us 2. Instead, the Oregon-based studio plans to take all of the content and features slated for the sequel and fold it into Among Us in a series of updates. "We realized, there's so much popularity, so many people are playing this," says Forest Willard, one of the game's creators. "How much of it are we going to lose by making a sequel? So we decided... We'll just keep adding stuff to the old one."
A decade ago, the video game world operated like the film and book industries. When a title was successful, it would spawn an endless stream of sequels and spinoffs. But today, thanks to the ease of online updates, many game makers have decided to continue improving and adding content to their titles indefinitely—a trend that the industry calls "games as a service." Popular multiplayer games like Fortnite and Among Us are particularly ripe for this kind of treatment, which can be even more lucrative than releasing brand new games. "Then we don't have to worry about convincing people to play one or the other," says Willard.
One of the biggest upgrades to Among Us is an account system that will allow players to track their progress and team up with friends. Willard also wants to implement new roles that will expand the game beyond crew mates and impostors. Willard and his colleagues, Marcus Bromander and Amy Liu, who met at Oregon State University, are still a little in awe of their success. Among Us first came out in June 2018 to little fanfare, entering what Willard called a "brutal, horrible market." But by the end of the year it had drawn some attention from video game streamers in South Korea. In the summer of 2019, Among Us became popular with players in Brazil and a few months later, the game got another burst in the U.K.
"At each one of these points we decided the game's done and we're just going to move on," Willard says. "Right after that would happen, we'd get another wave." Eventually, Among Us exploded into the big leagues around the end of the pandemic summer. An American streamer named Chance "Sodapoppin" Morris, who has about 6 million followers on Twitch, started playing the game for his fans. Other popular streamers followed. Soon the game had turned into a cultural phenomenon, played by celebrities and even politicians. In October, a stream by congressional representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar was watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers. InnerSloth began hiring, realizing that this new level of virality wasn't going away. Among the new recruits was Victoria Tran, who was hired in November to be the game's community director. "The cool thing for me joining the team is seeing how many different kinds of people play Among Us," she says. Tran says she loved seeing the game enjoyed by "people who feel like they wouldn't call themselves gamers." Among Us is so successful in large part because of its simplicity. To get into a game, all you have to do is text "among us?" to your buddies and have everyone jump in. But for InnerSloth, holding on to that success now is anything but simple. It's a task that may prove more challenging than deciding who to vote off the spaceship. —Jason Schreier | 
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