On Saturday, August 1, 2020, multiplayer deception game Among Us (created by Innersloth) hit its all time popularity high on Steam – 438,524 players. As of late February 2021, that number would fall in 2nd place on the leaderboard for most played games on Steam, up against hundreds of thousands of other games. Now, though, Among Us’s numbers have taken a drop to around 20-30 thousand, losing hundreds of thousands of players in a matter of months. This leaves a big question hanging in the minds of Among Us fans: Is it over? Is Among Us dead? 

One of, if not the biggest answer to why the game is losing players is the lack of new content.  Sure, there have been a few small features that did make the game better, but for the most part, there haven’t been any big content updates. One notable example would be the slow release of the new, large Airship map that Innersloth announced would come in early 2021. As of the writing of this article, it has still not arrived. Many players are becoming impatient in waiting for this new update, some going as far as to call Innersloth slow and lazy. The lack of content for months after the game’s explosion is certainly taking a toll on its enjoyment, with many players saying that it has become stale, and that new features would breathe life into the game. Mods (applications made by players that alter the game) are becoming increasingly popular, and they show that players are hungry for new content.

We have established that many Among Us players say that the game is getting boring. Is this Innnersloth’s fault? Well, it is complicated. Though Innersloth is the most obvious group to blame, as they are the creators of the game, there are a couple other aspects that make this  whole situation a lot more interesting. Firstly, the Innersloth team is tiny – there are five people in total, and only three that focus on coding. The team has stated before that Among Us was coded in a messy way, and that meant there were tons of bugs, and the smallest changes would lead to even more bugs. Also, Among Us blew up years after its creation, meaning that the Innersloth programmers likely would not remember a lot of the inner workings of the code, and that updating the game would be really slow. So it looks like the Among Us developers are not at fault, but that can be hard to believe when modders are adding things to the game at the same time. I do not believe that the developers would just throw away free money and popularity for no reason. I believe that there are things that we as consumers either do not know or are not talking about that are causing this lack of updates.

The game, and its developers, are far from perfect. I think a fantastic way to calm angry crowds, keep players, and increase public reception would be to simply communicate more. The developers have released minimal statements about the lack of content, and when they do, they are always vague. If their highly active Twitter account (AmongUsGame) is anything to go by, they are not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs – if they were to just clear up what their situation is in detail, more people would understand and be patient with them.  But when fans feel like they are talking to a brick wall (besides the Twitter account, but it does not center around development of the game, just the community), they get impatient. Fortunately, though, it looks like more communication is on the way – “Game development is a ton of invisible work, but definitely plan on writing a biggggg dev log post about everything soon,” responded the Among Us twitter account to a critical user. ”We wanna be transparent!” 

In my opinion, the Among Us programmers are just fine. Not updating a game is not a crime and is not worth the backlash. I do believe, however, that the developers should be more transparent (and they have said they are going to start doing that, which is good) in order to better maintain a healthy community.