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Among Us devs react to Fortnite Impostors and the response isn't great

By Eric Abent/

Yesterday, Epic Games announced a new limited-time mode for Fortnite called Fortnite Impostors. Almost immediately, people were drawing comparisons between Fortnite Impostors and Among Us, a game that rocketed to popularity last year as the COVID-19 pandemic kept people indoors and looking for ways to spend time with friends online. As it turns out, it seems that the release of Fortnite Impostors caught the devs behind Among Us off guard.

On Twitter, a couple of Among Us devs have given us their takes on Fortnite Impostors, and they aren't exactly glowing. Victoria Tran, who serves as Innersloth's community strategist and the community director for Among Us, said, "It would have been really, really cool to collab," before adding her belief that Epic should have done more to differentiate Fortnite Impostors from Among Us.

"Like game mechanics fine, those shouldn't be gatekept, but at the very least even different themes or terminology makes things more interesting?" Tran added. Later on, Innersloth co-founder and Among Us designer Marcus Bromander said that Innersloth has "been actively trying to collab with them," so it sounds like Innersloth has been reaching out to Epic about a potential Fortnite collaboration only to have the company launch this mode in Fortnite instead.

"We didn't patent the Among Us mechanics," Bromander said elsewhere on Twitter. "I don't think that leads to a healthy game industry. Is it really that hard to put 10% more effort into putting your own spin on it though?" Indeed, while Among Us has taken heavy inspiration from the party game Mafia (also known as Werewolf), it did add a number of things to the formula, namely tasks for players to complete and other methods of sabotage beyond simple misdirection.

It seems that Innersloth is disappointed that Epic didn't put its own spin on these mechanics in introducing Fortnite Impostors. It's certainly very easy to draw comparisons between Fortnite Impostors and Among Us, so it's hard to fault the devs at Innersloth for feeling slighted. We'll see if Epic tweaks Fortnite Impostors following these criticisms, but we're guessing that not much will change.

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