Among Us wins Golden Joystick Breakthrough Award

Among Us has won the Breakthrough Award at the Golden Joystick Awards.

The Breakthrough Award was presented by Mojang Studio and is meant to highlight smaller games which experienced a sudden rise to fame, such as previous winners Subnautica and Untitled Goose Game.

Among Us, having become a cultural phenomenon in 2020, won in no small part due to its incredibly fun and simple social gameplay that got millions of players to try the game out.

We won a Golden Joystick Award?!?! 🏆Thank you everyone 😭 Continually blown away by all this support ahhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHh https://t.co/qZyTwfSe8n

— Innersloth (@InnerslothDevs) November 24, 2020

Among Us developer accepts the Breakthrough Award

After being presented with the award, Innersloth gave a short acceptance speech during which they thanked their fans, friends, families, and partners.

Among Us earned significant recognition from the wider gaming community a few months ago when streamers and content creators helped the game spread.

The game itself is free to play on mobile devices and easy to pick up for curious players. This enticed players to try it out in droves, and led to the previously obscure and almost unknown multiplayer game becoming a global gaming event which took the world by storm.

With Among Us earning this kind of sudden fan following, it’s no surprise that it was a likely target for the Breakthrough Award.

Social deduction game @AmongUsGame wins the Breakthrough Award this year! Well done to everyone at @InnerslothDevs #goldenjoysticks pic.twitter.com/5ut4kEb8VB

— Golden Joysticks (@GoldenJoysticks) November 24, 2020

After accepting the award, Among Us development continues

Currently, the developers are hard at work trying to add new features to Among Us. A recent patch has already fixed a number of bugs and exploits, and at the moment, Innersloth has even hired a second unit team to develop accounts for the game.

In addition to the accounts system, Among Us also has a fourth map in development and a number of languages targeted for full localization.

It isn’t known exactly when these new features will be added into the game, with Forest Willard stating on Twitter that he doesn’t like to give release dates until he’s absolutely certain to reach it.

(Image Credit: Steamcharts) Among Us player count, Jan. 2020 - Nov. 25

At the moment, Among Us has seen its community explode into the millions, followed by a drawn out correction period when fans and players normalized their play schedules.

Currently, Among Us still sits regularly in Steam’s top 10 most played games and has an average player count of over 100,000 - a far cry from June when the game struggled to have more than 1,000 average players.