Among Us 2 was announced 36 days ago. Today, it is being cancelled so that the developers of the latest very big thing on Twitch can instead focus all their energies on making the original better.
In a blog post on the game’s site PuffballsUnited, one of the game’s co-creators, writes that the surge in popularity of the game, even in just the last few weeks, has made leaving the original behind (it was actually first released in 2018) and moving onto a sequel maybe not the best idea (emphasis mine):
Us devs have had several long discussions about what we want to do with the game. When do we stop working on Among Us 1? What content goes into Among Us 2? The main reason we are shooting for a sequel is because the codebase of Among Us 1 is so outdated and not built to support adding so much new content. However, seeing how many people are enjoying Among Us 1 really makes us want to be able to support the game and take it to the next level. We have decided to cancel Among Us 2 and instead put all our focus into improving Among Us 1. All of the content we had planned for Among Us 2 will instead go into Among Us 1. This is probably the more difficult choice because it means going deep into the core code of the game and reworking several parts of it. We have lots of things planned and we’re excited to bring new content to everyone as you continue to enjoy playing!
That’s…fine? It’s definitely the cleaner, safer option in terms of the player base, even if it does create a ton of extra work for the team.
Some of that “new content”, or at least the first of it that’s due to hit, are stuff like a friends system, colourblind support (which would also add more colours to the game!) and a new stage.