Competition Between Game Studios

Competition between game studios can be brutal. With so much money going into development, game studios have to nail down every aspect, from launch till the end to gain as much profit as possible. Even overlooked aspects such as release dates could heavily influence the sales of games as we, gamers, stay committed to only a few games for a certain time period. 

You might recall that in August, a game called “Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout”, by Mediatonic, took the world by storm. Earning a whopping $130 million in sales during its first month. The game overtook all others in terms of monthly earnings. Everything seemed great for the Meditonic until it got overthrown by “Among Us”, developed by InnerSloth, in the following month. That same month it became the most viewed video game on Twitch, a streaming platform. 

So how did this happen? Well, let’s start with the basics. During the pandemic, we probably all had an increase in our free time. Now for some of us, that meant that our screen time went up, in particular in video games. Fall Guys and Among Us just happened to be the most hyped games on the market during the pandemic. Another reason why both of the games took off so fast is their shallow skill curve, becoming more accessible to a wider audience who didn’t spend much time on games. 

But how did Among Us win this race? The crucial difference between Among Us and Fall Guys is that the first one is available on mobile devices. In contrast, Fall Guys is more demanding in terms of hardware. On top of that, among us is free on mobile. So naturally, it was open to a wider demographic as not everyone plays on PCs. Due to that, even with poor marketing and almost no advertising by InnerSloth, more than 100,000 players were using the game every hour in late August, a significant percentage were mobile users. 

According to SteamCharts, in the past month Among Us had a peak number of players of more than 430,000 on PC, compared to Fall Guys with an all-time high of 170,000 users. Fall Guys wasn’t the only game outshined by Among Us though. Triple-A titles, such as Crusader Kings III and Dead by Daylight had been selling worse than the game about bean-shaped astronauts. Unfortunately, InnerSloth does not post its financial reports but judging by the immense number of sales of the game on PC and even larger revenue from ads on mobile platforms, we can assure ourselves that the company has a promising future.

So, what comes next? Well, following the outstanding success of these two games and increased unemployment around the world, and considering the overwhelming simplicity of Among Us, it would be fair to say that a lot of new indie developers are going to enter the market (similar to the phenomenal success of Mojang’s Minecraft at the beginning of 2010s). Maybe this rapid growth of the games market and the IT market, in general, will be able to stop the deeper economic crisis from coming.

In conclusion, after thorough research and analysis, we have concluded that you’re kinda sus.

Written by Anuar Burkitbayev and Alexey Dudarev; edited by Alidar Kuatbekov.