Popularity, Network Effects, and the Suspicious rise of Among Us
Around August this year, a cute game about legged marshmallows looked like a bit of an imposter among the most popular games of the month. The game in question was Among Us, a videogame spin on the classic party game Mafia, where 4-16 players are charged with figuring out who the murderer is amongst them with very limited information.
The game was made by Innersloth, an indie studio composed of just 3 friends, and was released to PC via Steam, a game publishing site, and to Android and iOS via the App Store and Play Store respectively. For games developed by such a small studio like Among Us, they often release to a few excited fans, grow a decent cult following if they’re lucky, and fizzle out when the next darling comes along.
However, Among Us was more than just lucky. According to Wes Fenlon, writing for PC Gamer, the game peaked at almost 400,000 concurrent players on PC, and as of now has more than 100 million downloads on the Play store. It’s been immortalized in internet culture long past its peak popularity through the terms “sus” (short for suspicious) and “amogus” (an absurdist shortening of the name).
To many, the meteoric rise of this simple game may seem a little sussy, but if one is familiar with power laws, popularity, and network effects, it is plain to see why this happened.
For example, there is an idea when talking about network effects that a product is more valuable the more people are using it. The explosive popularity of Among Us is even sussier when one considers that it is a multiplayer game, which many agree is most fun when there are the maximum number of players (ten). Therefore, if the game had a very small player base, it would be wholly unattractive just by the intuitive idea that there would be no one to play with. But conversely, if there is a critical mass of players that believe in the game’s success, the multiplayer aspect becomes a great boon as avid players recruit friends to “buy” into the product. This critical mass, or “tipping point” can be seen around August of 2021, where a steadily growing user base suddenly rocketed all the way up to hundreds of thousands of players.
But this cannot explain the staggering numbers that pop up when discussing Among Us. This is where a concept called “The Rich Get Richer” can help. The idea behind this is that people tend to copy the decisions of people before them. In the context of the thousands of indie games that are released each year, this means that a game that gets even a little bit of a lead in popularity will tend to increase that lead exponentially.
So, what was the catalyst for Among Us’s lead? The answer is online streaming. Around July this year, streamers with hundreds of thousands of followers began to play Among Us live to thousands of viewers, recruiting other similarly popular streamers to play with. This initial boost by some medium-sized streamers eventually caught the attention of some of the largest streamers on the internet, and after that point the floodgates were blasted wide open.
If you’re interested in reading more about Among Us, or just want to be amazed by more huge numbers associated with its enduring popularity, I’ve put a link below to a PC Gamer article that explains its rise from a pure statistics perspective.
How Among Us became so wildly popular. PCGamer