Brandwatch Bulletin #06: How Among Us Took the Social Spotlight

Have you played it yet?

25 September 2020

Welcome to Friday’s bulletin. We hope you made it through the week okay.

Today we’re looking at the huge success of Among Us. A game of intrigue and deception, we try to work out how its popularity exploded out of no where.

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Back from the dead?

A game released over two years ago has become one of the most popular, most talked about games in the world right now. From all the press coverage to the endless streams featuring it, how did it suddenly garner so much attention?

Among Us is a video game based on the party game Mafia, also known as Werewolf. The concept of these games is relatively simple. Within the group, one or more people are secretly working against everyone else. If they are discovered, they lose. If they succeed in their aims, they win.

In Among Us, this concept is transported onto a spaceship. You join a game and one player is randomly selected to be the impostor. The impostor must sabotage the ship by messing with things or killing other players, and has to avoid detection while doing so.

The game was released in June 2018 by the developer InnerSloth. It attracted little attention, but the team continued to regularly update the game anyway. Things trundled along and the game was never commercially successful.

Then something happened.

In September, online mentions of Among Us skyrocketed. Despite the month not being over, they have already increased by 750% compared to August and by 3700% compared to July. It’s an undeniably massive rise for such a short period of time.

Let’s take a closer look at how we got here, and bring in some Google Trends data for extra context.

Interest began to increase at the end of August, with online mentions and search interest going up at around the same time. But in early September search interest jumps again, while online mentions don’t follow until later in the month.

Something initially got people talking about the game. This talking sent more people off to look into the game. The searches led to more players. And more players meant even more mentions as they discussed playing the game online.

It’s the circle of life for viral video games, but a spark is needed to set the process going.

What caused this?

First we should note that Among Us has seen some previous success online, but this was contained to Brazil and the Middle East. Search interest jumped in these places between June and September 2019. We also found lots of streaming videos of the game on YouTube posted by Brazilians in the same period.

It failed to catch on beyond that, and interest soon dwindled away. Occasionally mentions would jump a tiny bit here and there, and videos of the game were regularly uploaded to YouTube, but generally everything went quiet.

That was until a spike in YouTube comments on August 8 and 9 2020. Over 700 commenters were suddenly mentioning the game on the platform. About a week later it happened again, but this time with well over 3k commenters.

The vast majority of these comments can be traced back to a couple of videos from the popular YouTuber Markiplier. The videos are both streams of him playing a game called Completing the Mission, a title made by developer PuffballsUnited and released in August this year. Completing the Mission includes numerous references to Among Us and thousands of commenters pointed this out.

What’s the link? PuffballsUnited works for InnerSloth, and worked on Among Us.

Within a week of the second video, Among Us search interest and mentions began to climb. Things were taking off.

We can’t be 100% sure, but the timing suggests Markiplier’s videos, and his followers pointing out PuffballsUnited’s references, were a key catalyst to renewed interest in Among Us.

If true, PuffballsUnited turned a two-year-old, arguably unsuccessful game into one of the most popular titles on the planet right now with just a few in-jokes and niche references. That’s a pretty decent payoff.

Of course, it’s not just a couple of YouTube videos that have led to this newfound success – it’s the timing of it too. As PC Gamer points out, “In 2020, at least in the US where coronavirus still rages, getting together to play games like Werewolf in-person isn’t really an option. Right now we’re primed for most of our social interactions to play out over Zoom and voice chats, and Among Us is an easy laugh generator with friends.”

What Among Us represents is opportunity – not just for brand new games, but older games that are actually perfect for this weird time period. InnerSloth were two years too early, but luckily their work is now being discovered by masses of gamers at just the right time.

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