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"Among Us", the #1 game on Twitch, was created by a team of 3

Kotaku article: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/09/among-us-improbable-rise-to-the-top-of-twitch/

Among Us, which came out in 2018 to a positive but muted response.

“We’re really bad at marketing,” Among Us artist and game designer Marcus Bromander told Kotaku during a phone interview last week.

What InnerSloth, Among Us’ three-person development team, is good at, however, is staying the course even after a game has failed to blast into the stratosphere on day one.

“It didn’t release super well,” programmer and business lead Forest Willard told Kotaku over a Discord voice call. “But we got a bunch of feedback, by which I mean any feedback, which was pretty great considering [the circumstances]. So we added online multiplayer, and then at the end of the year, we did a Steam release. By December [2018], we started to pick up enough players that the game would stay alive 24/7, and that was, you know, good enough.”

“We stuck with Among Us a lot longer than we probably should have from a pure business standpoint,” said Willard. “We tried to quit and should have quit several times.”

Instead, the team kept putting out updates — as often as once per week, during some spans. They listened closely to fans, keeping in mind that, if their humble player base was asking for something, there was probably a good reason for it.

“It’s interesting to watch it spread through communities,” said Bromander. “Like, Sodapoppin and xQc play it, and then they bring in one League of Legends streamer, and then suddenly a bunch of League of Legends streamers are playing, and then they cross over into Hearthstone streamers, and then a bunch of Hearthstone players are playing it.”

Great article, I recommend giving it a full read. But overall an inspiring story for us Indie Hackers building games!

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