[dramatic music]
[Emory] Three years ago
built by a small team of three developers.
Last year, it was the most widely played video game of all time.
This is every indie developer's dream,
but how did
[Victoria]
based on a combination of a Mafia-like game
he played as a kid called Assassin and the movie
Originally in
while the crew mates attempted to hold it together.
Imposters could do task round to hinder players,
but we found this was too stressful
and didn't leave much time for detective work
and informed meeting conversations.
So after a lot of reworking, we ended up with the current system
and released the game for mobile in 2018; local mode only.
We got enough feedback from people who wanted to play,
but couldn't get together; that we added
online support in September when it also launched on PC.
Among Us
Forest, Marcus and Amy.
By January 2020, we considered the game feature complete
with three maps and fully online multiplayer gameplay.
We were prepared to move on to our next game
until the summer of 2020 happened very unexpectedly.
- [Emory] To really understand
we have to take a step back and examine each chapter.
After its initial release, the game had it's first spike of players
in South Korea in late 2018.
Aided by passionate Korean YouTubers and streamers,
Among Us
in December of 2018, and Korean players
were over half of
In the summer of 2019, the game was picked up by
some influential Brazilian YouTubers,
and their videos of
By the end of the summer,
over 1 million daily active users
with players in Brazil and Korea as a majority of their user base.
The game then cooled off at the beginning of 2020,
dropping to around half of its peak users.
This is around when the team was concerned
about the development of a sequel:
However, the game was subsequently featured on Steam
on August 5th, 2020 and through word of mouth,
it managed to climb back up to over a million daily active users.
This would begin
In just nine days,
and a few weeks later
would break eight digits. By the end of September,
Among Us
than any other game on the planet.
So how did a
- [Victoria] The answer we've given and will continue to give
is just utter shock and gratefulness.
Among Us
and its initial launch never hinted that it'd blow up two years later.
That almost never happens in game development,
especially for indies, and we weren't prepared.
One day, it was like, "Oh, it looks like a few more people
are picking up the game. Cool."
And then suddenly it became half a billion players.
So while it was exciting and amazing, it was also a shock to the system.
It still doesn't register in our minds how many people play this game.
But to be honest, there was a stressful side to it, too.
More eyes on a game that wasn't meant to handle all of this
basically felt like building a plane while flying it
as someone once described it. Except the plane is overbooked,
and you never expected the plane to take off.
And the navigation is broken and you're understaffed,
and everyone's demanding different in-flight meals,
but you only had time to prepare pretzels
and now different airports are asking you to land in them,
and they wanted this by yesterday. It's been pretty overwhelming.
That being said though, what kept us going,
has also been the major support we got from our players
and community at large.
We can't tell you how many times seeing someone's fan art,
animations, streams, mods,
or messages, and how much it helped them make friends
has pushed us through a lot of tough, dark times.
We're grateful for our community, and we want to do good for them.
- [Emory] So as you can see, with sudden success
also came sudden problems.
keeping up with a massive amount of new players.
There were frequent issues with players being unable to join lobbies
or getting disconnected entirely from games.
In came Unity, the Multiplay team worked closely with Innersloth
to deploy and stabilize our online multiplayer.
Even while millions of players around the world
were creating billions of lobbies.
The
Mobile versions of the game would show brief advertisements
to help pay for server and development costs.
But it was hard to fully control what was shown to their players.
Unity ads was able to step in and improve user experience
while giving the team more granular insight
of what ads were shown in the game.
- [Callum] So, the Multiplay and Operate solutions teams
at Unity have honestly been fantastic partners to work with.
They understand games, they're really easy to talk to.
More importantly, they always put our small dev team's needs above all else.
We've had a whole bunch of support in various areas,
even outside of what you'd expect from a company like Unity.
When we were introduced to the team, they helped us
solve our most pressing problems and stabilize
during what was a really intense time period.
But they've also done things like introduced us to our backend partner
that we've enjoyed working with them, which has gone really well.
Longer term, they've helped us work through multiple issues
around running and operating a huge live game.
Unity have continued to provide us with insights
around the game and helped us build out a future for
The people we work with are personable, smart and no drama.
We'd definitely continue working with them
and choose them for future projects.
- [Emory] With the game's core system stabilized,
Among Us
Using Unity Analytics and working with the Unity's
publisher operations team,
deep dives into how players are playing their game
so that they can best plan for what to do next.
Because the team had little internal resources to work on analytics,
Unity partnered directly with Innersloth to give the team
a strategic view of their data by providing
data visualization, analysis
and tailored gameplay recommendations.
- [Victoria] There is so much planned for
and working with Unity is one of them.
Future roles, more maps, cosmetics, gameplay modes,
and whatever else we can dream up. The community is what keeps us going,
and we couldn't be more grateful for the support.
All we want to do is make sure we do right for our players
and everyone that supported us.
So, thank you. (dramatic music)