Among Us is behind a huge spike in Discord’s mobile app downloads – The Verge

The surprise success of InnerSloth’s game Among Us was one of the bigger Twitch stories that happened this summer: over the last month, the game shot up a full 650 percent in hours watched on the site. (It has gotten so popular so suddenly that the developers at InnerSloth have canceled Among Us 2 to focus more on the first game.)

Its success has spawned other successes, too. Among Us’ spike in popularity has led to Discord’s mobile app downloads hitting new heights. As Apptopia’s Adam Blacker recently observed: “Discord has been hitting a new lifetime high for mobile app downloads every day since September 5th.” That’s around 800,000 installs a day.

Image: Apptopia

The reason Discord’s downloads and Among Us’ popularity are linked, of course, is because the game requires voice chat to function. It’s a hidden role game; your duty as a crewmate is to sniff out the impostors on your ship before they kill all of you. Because the game is cross-platform and because you need to chat with your teammates to find the impostors, it’s important to find an easy way to communicate with everyone at once. Discord also integrates fairly closely with Twitch, which means it’s even easier for you to stream your gameplay to the world.