Among Us popularity

When and how did “Among Us” become so popular?

“Whodunit” board games like Clue have long been popular with kids. The same is now proving true with gaming apps. The online multiplayer game Among Us, which was released in June 2018, is a fun remix of the idea of “finding the imposter in the crowd”.

As Taylor Bauer describes in the infotainment news site Comic Years: “Equal parts Clue and co-op sim game, the history of Among Us is an underdog story about trusting your instinct. There’s always been an audience for this type of game. It just took a lot of us at home, staying indoors, and craving connection to our friends to find it.”

We wondered if this statement was true: “It just took a lot of us at home, staying indoors, and craving connection to our friends to find it.”

To answer our question we:

  • Gathered data from Steamcharts, which tracks concurrent players in Steam games (one of the largest online gaming platforms).
  • Created a line graph that plots the maximum number of simultaneous players on the y-axis, and the date on the x-axis.

Reflect on what you see

Look and interact with the line graph above. When you mouse-over the line graph you’ll notice more information appears.

Think about the following questions:

  • What do you notice about the line graph?
  • What do you wonder about the data?
  • What was happening in the world during the peak times Among Us was being played? 
  • Can we speculate that social isolation caused by COVID-19 may have had an impact on the increase in Among Us players? Why or why not? 
  • Can you find other online games that showed peak usage during the same time period? 
    • How would you find the data for those games?

Use the fill-in-the-blank prompts to summarize your thoughts:

  • “I used to think_______”
  • “Now I think_______”
  • “I wish I knew more about_______”
  • “These data visualizations remind me of _______”

Learn how we visualized the data

Go to our walk-through (in Jupyter notebook format) to see how we used the data science process to create the line graph. (This process included formulating the question, gathering the data, analyzing the data with code, and creating the visualizations.)