Disinterest in the game after the release is not a sentence. Many games become popular among streamers even a couple years after release. Among Us is one of such projects, and today we will talk about how the game achieved an incredible increase of streamers and viewers on Twitch two years after its launch and why it can rightfully be considered a 2020 phenomenon.
Among Us is a 2018 survival game by InnerSloth LLC that has revived on Twitch in 2020 thanks to constant updates and increased attention from streamers. Initially, the game was made for mobile platforms, but the developers released a PC version at the end of 2018.
How did it all start?
Among Us' first surge in popularity on the platform was in early June 2020, thanks to one of the most popular Korean streamers hanryang1125: Kim Young Tae gathered 20K Peak Viewers. During the second burst on July 7, the top streamers list consisted only of Koreans, including such content makers as d_obby, saddummy, and ses836.
AdmiralBulldog from Sweden also helped the popularization of Among Us. Thus the game was noticed by sodapoppin, xQcOW, and HasanAbi: that’s why Western streamers have displaced Koreans in the top. In August, the top was filled with the rest of the famous American streamers, and in September, Spanish streamers Ibai, Auronplay, and others also tried the game.
We have deduced the Among Us dynamics of Hours Watched and Peak Viewers. Until July 2020, the game results did not exceed 400K HW, but in July, this mark reached 3.8M. In June Among Us was streamed by a maximum of 51 channels, then the number increased to 221 in July.
September was the record month for Among Us by Hours Watched — 147M. However, the game didn’t overtake Just Chatting at the end of the month; it lacked 21M Hours Watched. That month the game was streamed by 12K Peak Channels.
The Viewers Peak was reached in November — 774K, although you can see on the graph that this mark was almost the same for three months in a row.
The most popular Among Us streamers in 2020
XQcOW was the most popular streamer of the category in 2020: 20M Hours Watched, although the streamer was on the air for only 357 hours. Ibai stood out from the Spanish-speaking community — 14M Hours Watched. Brazilian content creator Gaules devoted the most airtime to the game in the ranking: 1.1K hours.
We should highlight such personalities as Sykkuno and Pokimane. They’ve constantly played together with other Twitch and YouTube streamers like Lilypichu, Corpse Husband, and Valkyrae, which helped them to enter the top of most popular Among Us streamers.
Now the game’s popularity is decreasing, but it still stays in the top 15 Twitch categories for the first two months of 2021. Regular competitions among streamers like Twitch Rivals help to keep the audience. They collect a lot of viewers at the broadcasts and lead among other events by the platform.
Read: Spanish region of Twitch Rivals Among Us takes the lead
Rivalry with Fall Guys
The viewers love to see the collaborations among content makers; that’s why the game quickly became the platform’s phenomenon.
A month before the Among Us “boom" on Twitch, the platform had a different leader: an unusual battle royale called Fall Guys, which was rapidly growing on the platform. However, Among Us won the competition and stayed in the top for several months. Still, neither Among Us nor Fall Guys have been able to overtake Just Chatting, a category that has remained top 1 for over half a year.
More about the rivalry of Among Us and Fall Guys can be found in this article.
Among Us is the brightest gaming revival in 2020. Streamers and viewers rarely return to relatively old titles that did not initially blow out on the platform. At the same time, the developers are interested in developing the project with game updates.
At The Game Awards 2020, representatives of InnerSloth announced a new map called Airship, which will also be the largest location in the game at the moment. Let's see if Among Us will experience a second explosion on the platform or will soon return to the numbers that were at the start.
Soon we’ll review other projects, which were brought to life in 2020 on Twitch. Subscribe to our socials to know all up-to-date esports stats.
