Does Among Us have the potential to be an esports title?

FaZe Clan recently organized an Among Us invitational tournament, with the participants list comprising of various streamers from around the globe. Despite a few glitches here and there, due to the constant stream switches, this event went pretty well.

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Is Among Us esports a real possibility?

Well, this question is somewhat subjective. When thought about intuitively, Among Us cannot really be played as a clan-based esport. For those who haven't played this title yet, it is a simple survival game. Ten players are on a space ship, a majority of them are Crewmates, while there are also a small number of Impostors.

The former have multiple objectives to complete, ranging from cleaning up O2 filters to destroying asteroids. The Impostors however, have very basic objectives. All they have to do is sabotage the ship, and kill all the Crewmates, without being identified.

There's a decent amount of strategy involved in Among Us, which is completely different from CS: GO or Valorant. But the selection between Crewmates and Impostors is completely at random. It is practically impossible to control who gets the latter role, and honestly, this process must be random for the game to be as entertaining as it is.

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Image Credits: FaZe Clan

To deal with this randomness, FaZe Clan devised a set of rules for the Among Us stream, which would earn players points. Since it's difficult to win a round being an Impostor, this team got five points for a round of victory, while the Crewmates got four.

Impostors were awarded a point for every kill they got as well. Crewmates were awarded two points for every Impostor they ousted, and penalised one point for voting against a fellow crew member.

While Among Us is mostly a solo game, team-ups are also possible. It does make the game easier if you're working with someone else. But there's still a chance that one of the partners in the team is an impostor. Be ready to be deceived. Watch the video below to see how teaming up can affect the game, be it positively or negatively.

Among Us though, does happen to be a perfect fit for a solo eSports setup. It requires a good deal of planning, which even then, would vary depending upon the role a player receives. Here’s link to the video showing an interesting strategy used to hide a dead body in Among Us.

Unofficially, there are a lot of Among Us tournaments being organised globally. Links to those tournaments can be found here.

No official tournaments have been held yet, but the sheer number of unofficial tournaments being held right now highlights the potential this game has with respect to an eSports segment. On the 4 th of October this year, UPL Esports organized an Among Us challenge, with $300 up for grabs and a chance to place on their ranked leaderboards.

The FaZe tournament announcement thread got a good response as well, with people actually being interested in seeing how a tournament would take shape.

Despite this, there still remain concerns in the community that conducting tournaments would make the game unecessarily competitive, Among Us isn’t a game which requires a lot of skill, which is what has been it's biggest selling point. Fans were quick to raise this concern as well.

Here's a stream from one of the tournaments held by PWR :

In the long run, everyone was competing against each other, so chances are that they could deceive you into voting for another crew member to get you to lose a point. It would be really interesting to see how players come up with new strategies, especially if Among Us ever makes it into the esports circuit.

Whether or not it will happen is a question that only time can answer, but the possibility of it eventually happening, certainly does exist.