MS03: Among Us, Ease of Use, and Twitch Crossover
Or "how this one game made a 700% increase in peak player base in one month"
Housekeeping
Welcome back to Making Stuff. Thank you to all the new signups from last week; I really enjoyed writing about Seraphine because mental health is a cause near and dear to my heart.
Again, if you’re interested in supporting my work, you can check out my Patreon. I briefly had this Substack newsletter available for monetary subscribing, but I think I was curious in how the platform worked rather than committing to something serious.
I think diversifying the platforms where your fans can support you is probably a bad idea, unless your base is so large that that diversity matters. Otherwise, you as a small creator end up having to maintain so many platforms that it becomes annoying and unwieldy.
But with that out of the way, on to the newsletter.
Among Us
It’s tempting to want to latch onto the news cycle about talking about US Congress members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar playing Among Us with Twitch streamers, but I’m not going to do that until later. I actually had plans to talk about Among Us before that happened, and the recent development of this big stream actually factors into my outline.
Among Us is an interesting phenomena to me because it has a long, long history of being unsuccessful. If we look at the Steam Charts page for the game, we’ll see that after its launch in November 2018, the game averaged less than 10 players per month for its first seven months. Within that first year (Nov 2018 - Nov 2019), the peak the game had playing at any one time was 676 in August 2019.
Even fast-forwarding a bit, the game didn’t start picking up traction until May 2020, well after COVID-19 lockdowns had started — the peak that month was 1,234 (which is a very cool number).
Then, well, September 2020 hits.
For people unaware, Among Us is a visual implementation of the social/party game of Mafia (or Werewolf). It is extremely cheap on PC (usually <$10), and free on IOS and Android with cross-play. In the game, a maximum of 10 players must complete tasks on one of three science-fiction-themed maps; however, there are up to three “impostors” among them, whose job it is to kill the normal crew members.
As bodies pile up, meetings are called to vote out members of the crew. If the impostors (or “mafia”, “werewolves” in other variants) become equal to the members of the crew by killing the others, they win. If the crew members vote out all the impostors, or finish their tasks, they win.
It’s a very simple premise, and the reason Mafia is so popular at parties is that it requires no set up, and it’s a very “learn by doing” kind of game. However, Among Us isn’t the first game that’s tried to make it visual. Tabletop games like The Resistance, Ultimate Werewolf, or Secret Hitler exist, as do video games variants like Mafia.gg, or Town of Salem.
The question that interests me is “why Among Us, and why now?”
Ease of use
Among Us blew up because it’s absurdly easy to acquire, minimizes difficulties playing other variants of Mafia, and was assisted via people exposing it via streaming. However, why it was picked up by streamers at the time it did is a bit more complicated.
I first watched a streamer play Among Us a couple months ago, and I introduced it to colleagues based on that stream. Since they could download it on IOS and Android with no cost involved, it turned a “Friday drinks” Zoom call into something memorable. Without the need to prompt people to download and register on Steam, purchase the game, and set up from there, the ease of getting everyone involved made the gameplay more of a focus.
With other Mafia games, so much emphasis is put on rules, roles of participants, and the way they play out — people can stumble over these semantics and get bored before they get hooked. I’ve known in-person Mafia games to take over an hour to reach their conclusion, and Among Us’ focus on brevity and user-friendliness means that even if you lose, you’re well on your way to another game quickly.
This kind of “shake off a loss, I learned something, go next” attitude is also what makes Battle Royale games like Fortnite and Call of Duty: Warzone so successful. It speaks to minimizing the frustration that may cause a user to jump off your game, and while someone has to lose, your game can code around how much they dwell on it.
A game of Among Us takes 10 minutes, tops, and it automates things that can be annoying while playing other versions of Mafia:
Giving the player tasks around the map means they have things to distract their attention. Tasks may be simple, but they may not be clear (by design), and learning/fiddling with the tasks is part of the timing window where Impostors can kill them.
Impostors have ways of breaking up clumps of players through sabotaging elements of the ship. They must be addressed at separate stations, or the crew will lose.
While dead, players turn into incorporeal ghosts that still can contribute to a win via completing tasks, which gives people things to do, and familiarizes them for next time. They can also watch how their murderer deals with the rest of the crew while being invisible to the remaining players.
In-person Mafia requires a lot of talking, and a lot of jostling for social bandwidth in a large, group discussion — if you aren’t making your own reads and justifying them while defending yourself from suspicion, there’s little else to do but act out your role.
If you’re new to a group of people, throwing around accusations of lying or manipulation can be awkward or uncomfortable. As someone who gets anxious accusing people he doesn’t know personally, Among Us’ system gives me things to talk about because I have things to do in-game that leads to witnessing others doing things that drive suspicion or grow trust.
If all you have in a verbal game of Mafia is “I think you’re suspicious for a superficial reason or a hunch,” the resulting conflict can be a lot to manage, or can — in an extreme case — damage a relationship. The visual nature of Among Us gets people comfortable with the nature of deduction games by easing them into it.
In short: game is more game, and not just deduction math.
Twitch, and onboarding
“So here’s why we’ve decided to throw you in a lava pit…”
All these things make Among Us a good “stream game”, because:
The audience can join at any time and watch a fresh round easily, like Battle Royales. Since rounds are not long, there’s a refresh of context as to who’s playing, and what their streamer of choice is doing.
There is no one “optimal” way to play; newbies may adopt strategies that may seem insane to seasoned players, but if they work, they work. This leads to memorable moments.
Because the game is usually played/streamed with voice chat, there is an unending variation in personalities, group makeup, and how they interact with each other in a genuine way.
The first time I thought about these last two points was when I asked myself why no one was begging Among Us to put in some kind of progression unlock system — no one was screaming for a Battle Pass to keep things from getting stale. My experience with Valve Software’s disastrous launch for Artifact came to mind, because the community seemed to have a lot of trouble enjoying the game alone — people argued that without a carrot on a stick to motivate them to play, Artifact was stale and boring.
Among Us has a rare victory in that the gameplay and the people playing it could carry someone to be satisfied with their performance for its own sake. For people in lockdown, Among Us also is a great way to involve family and friends and get talking when they may feel isolated, and that’s all it has to be; many of the best board games are explained by “you’ll get it once we start playing,” and yeah, Among Us takes about a round or two to understand, and then you can focus on getting better.
For Twitch streamers, all this serves another purpose, and it has to do with onboarding new audience members through connection, and increasing discoverability.
Because of the over-saturation of Twitch streamers, it can be very difficult to both carve our your niche, and expose new people to what makes you special. Among Us requires group play, and seeing streamers of all sizes come together to play means that naturally, there will be some crossover.
I’ve seen dedicated groups emerge that spawn their own communities in similar ways to how ongoing tabletop RPGs (like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons) are lately; because there’s a consistency of the players over time, their audience learns quirks, sees growth, and enjoys an authentic, genuine connection.
This is all in the streamers’ favor, especially if they’re a smaller-sized streamer playing with bigger personalities. It only takes one clutch play, or one sentence to spark a “hey, I want to learn more about this person,” and that can be the catalyst for an ongoing fandom, subscription, or connection.
In general, Twitch’s system (despite their efforts) leans towards insularity; you get comfortable with your stable of streamers, and it takes a conscious effort to expand. Through group tactics (like podcasts, tabletop campaigns, or games like Among Us) you’re kind of forced outside of your bubble; I’ve only seen streamers make this a thing on a few smaller occasions, and I think that people need to become more conscious of it.
However, the main awkwardness comes when people become too aware of it, and you run into the problem of smaller fish sucking up to bigger ones. Maybe that’s a topic for another time, though…
IRL Politics
“Great, now congress is involved…”
Beyond the idea of taking advantage of a “flavor of the month” kind of game, the reason why the AOC/Omar stream did so well is because it leveraged building connection with the audience — it also didn’t hurt that they brought on a lot of “household name” streamers, like Pokimane.
It went beyond the trite “politicians are gamers, too!” message, because it allowed both of the congress members to meet an audience in a familiar environment. Among Us, again, is low-impact in startup and gameplay, and also plays to a politicians’ toolkit: details, memory, and bluffing.
This wasn’t Joe Biden clumsily trying to dab in Fortnite because some handler told him that it would be the most likely to sway a demographic, or Bernie Sanders making an attempt to sway the financials of Final Fantasy XIV’s market board. It wasn’t embarrassing.
Even if you look at it cynically (which well, I will), it still seemed fun and showed a more human side to people that are out of arm’s reach for most of the public. That connection is the bedrock of political awareness and literacy; while I would hope that someone doesn’t vote for them solely because they played Among Us, that stream could be what pushes someone to read more into policies and just start caring.
Takeaways
This newsletter went a couple different places, but I wanted to sum up my main thoughts:
Among Us may have exploded overnight, but its beginnings were extremely humble. Its homepage is hosted on itch.io, a site known for being a host/storefront for many indie games, including those monstrosities you might code on a weekend and decide to throw up for laughs. It took years for this game to explode in just the right circumstances, and I’m extremely happy for them.
Part of Among Us’ success is realizing the pain points of Mafia-type games, and being able to develop around them to minimize their effects.
Among Us is successful to the public because of its low barrier to entry in terms of price and gameplay, and is a social game in uncertain social times.
Among Us is a goldmine for streamers due to endless replayability and the flexibility of different groups. It has a massive potential for cross-stream onboarding due to group play, and encourages showcasing of personality to drive connection.
That connection to an audience is leveraged by the right people when they can recognize its potential. It’s partially up to you to realize similar opportunities.
Thanks again for reading this week. We’ve reached a nice milestone of 20 subscribers across these first two entries, and I’m extremely happy with that.
If you have any feedback, feel free to hit me up on Twitter. Again, you can support me on my Patreon, or by following me on other social media like Instagram and Twitch.
Image credits: Pexels, Among Us’ itch.io page, Twitch’s stream category for Among Us, Steam Charts