Among Us is now the most popular game ever, in terms of monthly player base dwarfing everyone else by a monumental margin.
Roughly half a billion players hopped into Among Us in November alone across three platforms, and that number is expected to frankly increase as it arrives on even more platforms in the near future. The Among Us train is just beginning to pick up steam, and it isn’t going anywhere based on the low cost of entry and consistent development that has been offered as the title gains an unprecedented amount of popularity.
Some could, perhaps, draw comparisons to the rise of PUBG, and how it took over streaming platforms which set a precedent for future battle royale titles stomping around inside their genre, such as Fortnite.
Now, Epic Games is drawing some ire from fans as they’ve announced a limited-time game mode for Fortnite called The Spy Within which is…well, exactly like Among Us in terms of rules and play.
Two imposters need to kill other players while they try to do tasks, while crewmembers (Agents) call meetings to discuss any suspicious activity. Stop us if you’ve heard this before.
It’s old hat, in that it has been competently conducted before with the title that the developers of Fortnite are directly riffing from. Arguably, that is what made Epic Games a colossal amount of cash as they riffed PUBG but with a more whimsical style, which ultimately brought about the Epic Games Store with its headaches and frustrations.
Some users have taken Epic to bat for ripping directly from Among Us rules and playstyle.
It’s very, very easy to take Epic Games to the plate for a hundred and three different things that they’ve done within the industry that has resulted in a net loss instead of a net positive for the industry. This is hard-pressed to be considered one of the reasons to bring their feet to the fire if we’re being even-handed.
Popular iterations of genres (it could be argued that Among Us echoes of Trouble in Terrorist Town, although far removed from the 1:1 translation) has offered the growth of the game industry for decades; it’s why there are first-person shooters now, along with team-based shooters, RPGs, ARPGs, and everything else that one could fathom comes from a long lineage of titles that have been steadily arriving more than most have been alive.
Even 1:1 rule conversions play different in a 3D space than isometric.
This being said, it’s not like Epic Games is doing anything more than copying a title that is extremely popular. This isn’t the reinvention of the wheel, no matter it’s marketed. It also isn’t some unprecedented maneuver for the industry as a whole.
