Fortnite rips off Among Us (again) with Impostors mode

With today’s v17.40 update to Fortnite, the popular battle royale game has added a new limited time mode that might sound a bit familiar. It’s called “Impostors” and it urges you to “trust nobody.”

Like I said, it might sound familiar.

That’s because Impostors is a blatant rip off of the game Among Us, which blew up in popularity last year. In the new mode, players take on the role of Agents or Impostors and are stationed at The Bridge. Agents must complete mundane tasks like calibrating llamas and delivering Storm reports, while Impostors must stop them, either by sabotaging or eliminating.

Like I said again, a complete copy of Among Us. I mean, it’s like Epic didn’t even try and make it unique to Fortnite. They even stole the same terminology with “Impostors,” which is one of the two roles in Among Us.

Now to be fair, it’s not like Among Us is the first of its kind either. The mechanics are heavily inspired by the party game Mafia (also known as Werewolf). Among Us wasn’t even the first video game to do it. But Innersloth did expand upon the ruleset with crew tasks and found a way to present the mechanics in a way that were fun and not too complicated. In other words, they were the first to popularize Mafia in the video game form.

Now here comes Epic with all their billions in revenue and instead of collaborating with Among Us, are simply copying the idea. Naturally, the developers of Among Us are disheartened by the entire mode.

https://twitter.com/TheVTran/status/1427725916994682887

Tran has got a point, for sure. Borrowing the mechanics is one thing. Heck, this isn’t even Fortnite‘s first attempt at copying Among Us. In December of last year, Fortnite introduced The Spy Within, a limited time mode build by a team of Creators that also had very similar mechanics to Among Us. Although the concept was the same, it wasn’t as blatant a rip off as Impostors seems to be.

Listen, I get it. Epic is doing everything it can so that Fortnite remains the most popular video game. That includes stomping on the indies. If you’re one of the suits, you probably don’t care who you copy from as long as you hit your quarterly goals. But as a developer, I can’t imagine the people working on this mode in Fortnite took much pleasure in it.