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Sometimes it helps to remember that Among Us is a two year old game. According to the developers at Innersloth, Among Us 2 had been begun internally, but after the massive yet delayed success of Among Us, they decided to simply add the planned features to Among Us 1 instead.
The Future of Among Us: What we know so far
In a developer blog post, the developers at Innersloth stated:
“The main reason we are shooting for a sequel is because the codebase of Among Us 1 is so outdated and not built to support adding so much new content. However, seeing how many people are enjoying Among Us 1 really makes us want to be able to support the game and take it to the next level. We have decided to cancel Among Us 2 and instead put all our focus into improving Among Us 1. All of the content we had planned for Among Us 2 will instead go into Among Us 1.”
This post reveals a good amount of information already, but before we do a deep dive let’s take a look at the features they announced would be coming to Among Us.
- * Servers. Forte is still working very hard to figure out our server issues. We don’t have an ETA but things should hopefully be getting better and better. This is taking up all development time on his end.
- * Colorblind support. It’s something we’ve put off for way too long… We plan on adding other identifiers for players as well as certain color focused tasks (Like wires). This should also open the potential for more colors. In the past we couldn’t add more colors because it became too difficult to tell players apart.
- * Friends/Account System. This is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time but just haven’t been able to tackle. For the health of the game going forward we’re going to sink our teeth in and figure it out! This one will definitely take some time.
- * A new stage! It is still very early and we have only just begun designing the layout. The theme has been settled on though! The next stage in Among Us is going to be a Henry Stickmin themed location!
Among Us: What we can learn from the developer statements
From the offset we know that Among Us, despite being a relatively small game, is actually rather difficult to make changes in. We can imagine this is because the developers, when making Among Us, were more concerned with making a game that simply worked, and did not want to bog themselves down with too many additional features.
However, with Among Us exploding to become one of the biggest games of the end of the year, Innersloth decided to continue supporting Among Us. This is likely a good choice, as it fosters goodwill between the developers and players, and allows them to better capitalize on their success.
Additionally, it’s noteworthy that many of the announced features are quality of life improvements. Things like colorblind modes make the game fun for everyone to play, regardless of any potential visual impairment.
How much has Among Us grown?
For context on how successful Among Us was and now is, let’s take a look at the game’s Steam charts. Among Us released in November of 2018 and the following month peaked at 17 players. By August of 2019, the game had peaked at just 676. As recently as April of this year, its peak was still just 850.
But July saw the game peak at 6,771, August at 73,159, and not even through September the game’s peak reached 388,385! No wonder the servers are struggling to keep up.
It took two whole years for Among Us to find the success it deserves, and Innersloth deciding to refocus their efforts on improving the first game shows that they are grateful to the community that adopted the game.
