Why Did Among Us Die So Fast? (Full Retrospective)

among us defines an entire age of youtube and the internet the time when just having a game to play with friends while the outside world was in panic was all we needed to please ourselves during tough times however that time has since passed and so has among us as a game i've covered the entire journey from start to finish on this channel as it's happened but today let's take a deep dive into the full story of what made this game so great and of course what leads us to where we are now so among us has had one of the more humble beginnings starting with a little-known game called mafia mafia if you didn't know isn't even a video game but rather a party game where there are a majority group of innocent people and a small group of bad guys the trick is nobody knows who's good and who is bad so the goal for the innocent is to figure out who is betraying them while the bad guys have to blend in while also completing the main goal of the game which is to unsuspectingly kill all the innocent people until they either get caught which would be a win for the innocents or until there are more murderers than there are innocent people where the murderers would win this psychological 1980s game is a pretty generic style of gameplay that can be done through cards board games or most notably video games in the early 2000s some of the first video games to start some real buzz using this mafia style would be games like the sea or town of salem town of salem is a much more traditional style mafia game just with more roles like town mafia and neutrals complicating the original game a little bit while also still staying very true to the pure psychological elements of the genre while games like deceit focused a lot more on gameplay being mixed with a first person shooter style where the players could also fight back against the imposters there's a million different examples of mafia style video games throughout the years i could spend all day talking about them but the most popular example of this genre is of course among us and the title first began development in late 2017. the development team right out of the gate already had some problems when developing this game though because the developers go by the name of inner sloth and outside of among us you may have actually already heard this name before because they also made the incredibly successful henry stickman collection that at the time was also still in development so they were met with the decision to balance out working on their far more successful henry stigma games or taking a risk on working with this new baby at the time codenamed as space mafia and funny enough they would actually end up prioritizing space mafia putting a minor pause on their henry stickman games in favor of this brand new game giving it a much sooner release date of june of 2018 and by the time the game would release this decision would initially seem like a pretty bad one because after what was noted as an annoyingly difficult development process the game would release to a horrifically poor reception only averaging around 40 could current players total on their only platform which at the time was mobile disappointingly low numbers but there's a couple of reasons that make this low number pretty warranted first off the game was initially free but on mobile only meaning the only real way to play it was on one specific device unlike the plentiful amount of ways that we have to play it now and also the game was local multiplayer only meaning the only way to actually play the game was to be in the same room as the people you were playing with which was pretty annoying and inconvenient and also because the game could only be played when people were in the same room as each other that means that they didn't bother to implement any sound into the game to avoid revealing who the imposter was to everybody in the same room not to mention that even the developers admitted that they were quote really bad at marketing and while they don't go into any greater detail we could see the proof in the pudding because the game was written off as an overall failure just months after its launch it was so much of a failure in fact that the developers on multiple occasions wanted to entirely stop the development of among us and from a business perspective they probably should have the game had hardly any players and they were spending hours and hours developing the game just to get minimal recognition for their work however the developers carried on they credited their unreasonable work ethic towards the title at the time to the small but vocal player base that backed the game in its early stages and they actually ended up working out in their favor as a few months later the game would keep developing and it would actually release onto steam as well opening up an entirely new market of players and in the process they implemented tons of different gameplay features as well like newer tasks brand new maps and most notably the addition of online multiplayer and sound so that meant anybody could play anywhere without being in the same room so all these updates seemed pretty cool but initially they actually didn't pay off because just looking at steam charts we could see that among us from the start had very similar success to its mobile version or should i say lack thereof with around 20-ish players playing consistently within the first few months but fortunately enough this didn't last as later throughout the year the developers would release two brand new maps for among us outside of the original releasing the mira hq map in august of 2019 and then the third map named polis in november of 2019. upon the release of these dlcs that initially cost four extra dollars the game began to build a bigger community not only on mobile but also on steam breaking all the way into the hundreds of concurrent players and almost even breaking a thousand at the turn of the new year and this new year of 2020 would actually mark itself as the turning point for among us as a game and its success because after cutting the price of dlcs all the way down to two dollars in january and even to free in june of 2020 the among us player base began to rise dramatically starting the year off by having hundreds of players consistently on their game and very quickly as the months went on hundreds would then start to become thousands turning among us from a little failure of a title into something that was actually relatively successful with a moderately sized community around it the fan base among us was building around this time was a long time coming and things were perfectly lining up for them starting initially with the pandemic that flooded march of 2020 onward because as the world began to go under lockdown everybody began to panic and feel alone depression rates were even rising as people were stuck inside forced away from their friends and even family for months however as the pandemic worsened people realized that this new life was something that they were gonna have to adjust to and thanks to platforms like zoom everyday life began to feel normal again but the separation for people also left out a desire for leisure activities with friends and family that were put on hold after everybody was put into lockdown and with all this new coming free time and loneliness people search for new ways to interact with each other and as i'm sure we all know one of the most notable ways people did this was through video games opening up new opportunities for multiplayer games to reach new heights like fortnite fall guys and of course among us however while the pandemic can be credited with starting the small little boost of success that among us had at the beginning of the year it would be nothing in comparison to what would happen in july of 2020. this stupid game called among us like don't call it a stupid game it's great now how do you play it what do you do so it is it is a social deduction game just like werewolf or secret hitler this streamer that you may recognize is known by the name of sodapoppin he's amassed millions upon millions of followers on twitch and was known for streaming all sorts of different games throughout his time on the platform and one day while streaming upon searching for new games to play on stream he was randomly recommended the at the time unknown to him game called among us and upon this recommendation sodapoppin would actually download it and give it a try this stream would mostly end up consisting of sodapop and learning the ins and outs of this little game that he had never heard of and within time he not only starts to get the hang of it but he actually begins to enjoy it and one little among us stream started to eventually become a series of sodapop and getting on with some friends to enjoy the new title this one little string of live streams in mid to late july was the biggest thing that ever happened to the among us developers as from this point the game would absolutely explode in popularity going from an already peaking june 2020 month of 6 000 players all the way to 70 000 players in july absolutely smashing its peak and even solidifying among us as one of the biggest games at the time sodapoppin's millions of followers witnessed the influential creator co-sign this game and upon watching him play the game they would actually share it with their groups of friends filling up 10 player lobbies domino effecting into hundreds of thousands of fans in the span of just a couple weeks but of course sodapoppin may have started the spark for among us and its success on platforms like twitch and youtube but that was actually only the beginning because if one streamer could cause such a roaring explosion in popularity what would happen if two streamers tried it or maybe 10 or how about every single person on twitch entirely is that not enough well let's move over to youtube where hundreds of millions of people were exposed to among us thanks to pewdiepie corpse husband valkyrie mr beast even and tons and tons more fast forward just a couple weeks after soda pop and stream and the seemingly impressive 70 000 players reached before would be absolutely smashed just a month later in august when among us would peak at 438 000 concurrent players instantly making it one of if not the most played game on steam at the time living among greats like csgo and dota 2 that have been building up big audiences for multiple years but we're being outclassed by this small multiplayer game that it just came in the limelight a couple weeks previously among us had within days became the hottest topic of all time thanks to the millions of streamers playing around this title and while of course i'm giving a lot of credit to the streamers and youtubers who played it it also helped a bunch that it was just a good and simple game to play for anybody this reach of millions that among us had was reached not only thanks to the amount of people sharing the game around but also thanks to the simplicity of the game as well because at the core all the game is is as mentioned just a video game integration of games like mafia and so therefore the game itself basically requires no previous video game experience to play and understand as 90 of the game was about communication and talking with friends which is exactly what people were wanting in a video game months into being quarantined away from those people this game's explosion would be around the same time as other titles like fall guys would also see success for the same reasons it was super simple there were a lot of streamers playing it and so on however among us would actually end up outliving all these smaller titles completely in the coming weeks due to its basic yet lovable nature not to mention the strong community around it that thrived through things like the 999 iq plays and of course most infamously the millions of memes that would come up around the time from red being sus all the way to among us this new age of multiplayer gaming that among us was the head of led it to being the most popular game of the year by far out of complete random but as you could imagine especially after the downfall of fall guys among other things people were keeping a good eye on among us to see what would happen next and it seemed like even they were aware of this because eventually the developers would announce that the original among us was going to be entirely left behind in favor of a brand new sequel that they had unexpectedly decided to work on among the sudden demand for new content for the game the reason that they said that they did this was because the original base game of among us turned out to be built pretty poorly and therefore a sequel would have made it a lot easier to keep up with the incredibly high demand for updates that they were flooded with and couldn't fulfill because of how difficult it was to develop among us with all the planned updates that they had in store for the future so at this point in late august it really felt like nothing could go wrong for among us they were the most played game the most talked about game and plus an even better sequel was set to come out at some point in the near future what could go wrong for them well very quickly the things that made among us so great whether it was the streamers playing the game everybody talking about the game and of course the ambitious future of among us two would very quickly one by one begin to crumble in front of them beginning with the just mentioned sequel because as development for among us two would go on very early on the team had to balance out whether or not it was worth putting all this time effort and money into a fully brand new game just to make development take less time when they could be using those resources to work on their already successful game they originally were trying to develop both the first and the new sequel at the same time but eventually it became clear that the timing put towards the sequel wasn't worth it and the sequel would end up entirely being scrapped they claimed that they made this decision because of how many people were enjoying the original game but this choice was most likely influenced by the previously mentioned high demand for new content for the game fast along with also the fact that the original game started to have some serious problems from server issues to toxicity issues and even hacking problems as well and overall among us was beginning to fall apart the first and most popular example of among us's instability was of course the server issues that plagued the game during its initial popularity obviously going from a thousand players to 400 000 players in a couple months was going to be a huge strain on the servers and initially the solution was as simple as making more lobbies for people to play in because there were so many active players but as the game grew more and more the game itself was literally entirely shutting down at times making it impossible for anybody to play the solution to this was to of course just make better servers but as mentioned it was basically impossible to do when the original game was so poorly built that adding updates was incredibly difficult so therefore servers were consistently plagued with bad quality causing people to be randomly kicked out assuming the game would even work at all and this was all happening while the games themselves were having huge problems with hacking and toxicity in early october of 2020 articles like among us has a cheating problem would release highlighting many issues among us had with people taking over the games and just ruining the fun for everybody by either using third party software or just simply use the open chat to their advantage to spoil the entire game to everybody just your average everyday trolls trying to take advantage of any system they can to ruin the fun for everybody now these toxic players were annoying and all but they would be nothing compared to the horrific attacks of the infamous hacker by the name of aerys loris that would follow in the same october month north american users would begin to report around this time of a user by the name of aerys loris taking over their lobbies advertising different social medias like youtube channels and other different handles most notably the hacker's own discord server which was described as containing racism gore pornography and images depicting animal abuse to anybody who entered the server these hacks would also include messages promoting political candidates like donald trump who were set to have elections held for them in the following months eventually after a couple weeks of these attacks the article website eurogamer would get the chance to interview the mysterious alice loris revealing that they had displayed these messages to nearly 5 million different players across nearly 2 million games in the span of their existence these events would escalate all the way to the point where among us announced that they called an emergency server update while warning players to only stay in private lobbies for the time being to avoid being exposed to the propaganda and shock content aerosories was displaying across their servers these issues spanning across the platform of among us devastated the community hurting not only the reputation of the company but also the player base starting a sharp decline from well above 300 000 in the month of the attacks and server issues all the way down to sub 200 000 the next month decreasing more and more sharply as the days went on this decline would also have to do with many different external problems with among us starting with the streamers and youtubers that were initially the ones responsible for giving among us this platform all the big names that blew among us up whether it be pewdiepie sodapoppin critical markiplier and everybody between were all known for their variety content playing and reviewing tons of different games throughout their years on the platform and naturally when among us started to become popular they played it for a little while enjoyed it talked about it and then moved on to the next popular game that followed forgetting about among us entirely it also didn't help that as we already mentioned among us was built incredibly poorly and therefore they had major issues with releasing updates as they were trying to entirely rework the outdated games code to make it work in a more modern setting which led to month long layovers between even the smallest updates and if we are being honest while among us is a fun game and all at the end of the day all it is is a party game and nothing else meaning it's meant to be played at very specific volumes and rather than grinding it all day like some other different games similar to call of duty the game could only be played for so long before it just naturally got boring which for most people meant that after maybe a couple weeks they just stopped playing it because there was nothing new to do anyway and the long waits for updates definitely didn't help the community and its reputation also began to take a big hit from this declining audience as well because similar to games like fortnite or even minecraft at one point the large fulfilled community around their game began to quickly turn against them and it started to be cringey to like among us or talk about among us memes because it got so old so fast and people were just done with that it's the modern day equivalent to the minecraft kid who went to school with their creeper jacket and read their minecraft redstone book it honestly became uncool to like among us and in a day and age where everybody seeks validation from everybody that does a number to a community leading to among us having one of the sharpest declines ever after their august 2020 peak ending the year with a concurrent player base of around 100 000 players give or take but as the year began to turn over into 2021 and as among us was starting to decline at even more rapid pace the developers would begin to take new action to attempt to stagnate the decline of among us bringing us to the third part of the story the failed comeback attempts of among us so come early 2021 among us was at an interesting point it was still one of the most popular games around boasting well over a hundred thousand players at certain times as mentioned however its quick decline was incredibly concerning to the developers as people are moving on from the game and forgetting about it for the reasons mentioned previously now with that being said come the new year the developers started to make attempts to turn the opinions of people and bring them back with among us however although there were good intentions right out of the gate the game was immediately flooded with controversy the first update of 2021 would be in february and the goal of it was to control the previous epidemic of hackers and toxic players flooding the game systems that were easy to manipulate thanks to the ability to play under anonymous accounts along with the open chat features where anybody could say whatever they wanted at any point so the developers looked at these two problems with the chat in this update and would extensively limit these features first by starting an account system forcing players to specify their age and other details to use features like open chat in order to avoid people under the age of 13 from being exposed to toxicity while also making it easier to track hackers through their accounts these features were initially a little bit criticized for being a bit inconvenient but it wasn't really much of a big deal the real most controversial part of this update would be the implementation of the quick chat wheel the quick chat wheel was a system of communication that allowed for people under the age of 13 to talk without using the open chat feature while also making it easier to communicate using controllers or other game pads when developing ports to consoles along with the nintendo switch this update was marketed as protection from all the bad people who flooded the game before from toxic chatters to hackers however it came at the expense of pretty much every single gameplay element among us had to offer the new quick chat function made it nearly impossible to have a genuine conversation about anything game related because the chat was either flooded with conflicting one-word arguments as everybody spammed who they thought the imposter was mindlessly with no evidence or the chats would just make no sense because even though the quick chat wheel was meant to make things quicker they made it basically impossible to explain anything that was going on this essentially made most public lobbies entirely unplayable because it was constant unrecognizable spam assuming half the lobby didn't just leave the moment they didn't get the imposter and overall all these precautions to try and filter out all the bad people inside of the games just really hurt the simplicity of among us because at the end of the day it was meant to be nothing more than a fun mini game anybody could hop on and play at any time but all these extra steps everybody had to make just to be able to use chat made it feel more like a burden and a hassle that people weren't big fans of however while everybody was complaining and the game was entirely controversial the numbers don't reflect negatively at all and in fact for the first time in months the player base not only stopped going down but it began to increase again despite their last update being poorly received and there's a couple reasons for this one because all press is good press and it gave among us a lot of attention again and two because in the previous december the developers would announce a brand new map by the name of the airship set to release in march of that year and as hype began to grow larger and larger as the day grew closer among us just a month previous was already beginning to gain some traction once again and moving into march the map would end up releasing and it was actually a pretty successful launch the game at this point was still hovering around the 100 000 player mark which is still beyond great and the map seemed to be successful at the goal of turning the negative direction of this game around the same streamers known for giving among us this first few boosts back in 2020 were also actually even returning to the game for an extra stream or two which also significantly contributed to this game's eventual turnaround but of course this shift in player bases would be short-lived because about a month after the release of the airship all of their efforts felt wasted as the game would immediately nose dive straight into the dirt even stronger than they were before cutting from 100 000 players in march when the airship released all the way down to 28 000 cutting the player base down by more than 70 on steam alone and as much as i hate to say it there isn't really much of a happy ending to the story either if that's what you were looking for because this big decrease in players would never really stop and the only time they would really combat their shrinking number ever again would be in late 2021 when the game would be ported on the consoles finally but even that wasn't turning around the trends of among us and most recently the game would hit a new low that none of us were expecting after months of failing to make the game popular again through design changes friendless integrations and even new game modes that are projected to come out soon among us in august of this year would hit a new low player base of 3 3500 players and for the first time ever the game has become less popular now than it was even before the game ever blew up dropping from 450 000 players all the way to the saddening 3500 in just two years or in other words a drop of 99.3 percent while this drop is horrifying i guess to end things on a somewhat good note we at least aren't looking at a story of struggling developers reaching for their desperate need of success inner sloth started as just a three-person team and by any objective measure among us still to this day is actually doing pretty well especially when considering we are only talking about steam numbers here and while we don't have the data from the mobile versions or even the later console versions of among us it definitely wouldn't be a stretch to say that the game at its peak had tens of millions of constant players eager to play among us and while especially as the pandemic eases up and among us is slowly becoming a relic of the past it was a relic that i think we all look back on fondly it represents a day and age the time when just having a game to play with friends while the outside world was in panic was all that we needed to please ourselves during tough times [Music] you

Channel: Sheeprampage

Views: 862,104

Keywords: among us, among us animation, among us song, among us funny moments, among us in real life, among us memes, among us live, among us gameplay, among us bad timing, among us 100 players, why did among us get popular, among us hacks, among us gameplay no commentary, among us dead, among us release date, among us drip, among us musical, among us new map, among us airfield, among us tiktok, is among us dead, is among us dying, is among us on switch, among us meme, among us 2

Id: jds1xPi3KXM

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022