InnerSloth’s idea for a Mafia-like game inspired by The Thing (1982) met with moderate success after being picked up by Korean and Brazilian audiences. The team was considering a sequel when, in summer 2020, the game was featured on Steam. This moment catalyzed Among Us to break the eight-digit mark in daily users, turning the game into the phenomenon we know today. But how did they deal with their sudden, explosive success?
Improving stability and UX as Among Us became the world’s most-played game
June 2018
Mobile, PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S
Unity
When Among Us became a sudden smash hit, Innersloth needed to ensure they could still provide the best for their players. By partnering with Unity, they were able to deliver a stable online experience with Multiplay, all while gaining the data they needed to deliver new features to their fanbase using Unity Analytics.
Among Us was released in June 2018. Post-launch, the game saw a spike in players much later in the year, when it was picked up by South Korean content creators. The next summer, it got another bump when Brazilian YouTubers helped the title accumulate another 1 million DAU.
In 2020, the game dropped to around 500K DAU, and the team began to think about a sequel. That August, the game was featured on Steam and everything changed. It bounced back up over a million DAU and then doubled that nine days later, before finally breaking eight digits in DAU a few weeks later.
Among Us wasn’t built to handle such numbers, and its initial launch never hinted that it would blow up two years later. InnerSloth simply wasn’t prepared.
Victoria Tran, InnerSloth’s community director, explains what it felt like to work on the game when it exploded in popularity:
“Suddenly, it became half a billion players. While it was exciting and amazing, it was also a shock to the system.
“It felt like building a plane while flying it, except the plane is overbooked, you never expected the plane to take off, the navigation is broken, you’re understaffed, everyone is demanding different meals, but you only had time to prepare pretzels, and now different airports are asking you to land in them, and they wanted all this by yesterday!”
The team wasn’t scaled to tackle these kinds of challenges, and issues stopped them from working the fun parts of their game.
Tran notes that the community is what kept the team going through the challenges that this popularity surge brought.
“We can’t tell you how much seeing someone’s fan art, animations, streams, mods, messages, or hearing how the game helped them make friends, has pushed us through the tough times. We’re grateful for our community, and we want to do good for them.”
The InnerSloth team needed some backup to help them steady their airship, as well as to plan for future smooth flights as they built out ideas for new content and features.
Among Us’s servers were having difficulty keeping up with the massive amount of new players. There were frequent issues with players being unable to join lobbies or disconnected from games entirely.
The Unity Multiplay team worked closely with InnerSloth to deploy and stabilize their online multiplayer offering, even as millions of players around the world were creating lobbies.
The team behind Among Us also ran into ad-quality issues. Mobile versions of the game would show brief ads to pay for server and development costs, but it was hard to fully control what their players were seeing.
Unity Ads was able to step in and improve the user experience while giving the team more granular insight into what ads were shown in the game.
Wherever you are in your development lifecycle, Unity has the battle-tested solutions you need to build, manage, and grow your game.
