Multiplayer space mystery Among Us hits 1.5 million simultaneous players

Among Us is a party game first released in 2018 about a spaceship crew who are just trying to do their mundane jobs—only there are also impostor players sneaking about murdering them and shifting blame onto the innocent. It's like Werewolf in space, yes. Though it didn't set the world on fire at launch, it's recently become a hit with streamers and is currently Twitch's number one game, with 183,000 viewers at the time of writing.

The sudden burst in popularity has caused some server problems for developers Innersloth, a team of three based in Washington. As they tweeted over the weekend, "Among Us servers are filling up again! We're hitting 1.5 million players online at the same time! We're slowly getting the hang of things but please bear with us! We'll get through this."

Although the PC version of Among Us is doing well—it's the number three most-played game on Steam at the moment, with a peak of 182,774 players today—most of those 1.5 million players have come from the mobile version, which is free.

Emma Matthews summed up the popularity of Among Us by saying, "More than anything, Among Us' appeal stems from its focus on the players, and this is one of the reasons why it's not only fun to play with friends, but also entertaining to watch. If you're playing with a group of big personalities, there are bound to be some fireworks. Tensions mount as people become increasingly frustrated about potentially losing, or begin to sweat about getting found out."

Thanks, RPS.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.