Memescape: The Rise Of Hype Gaming

Some multiplayer games burn bright and die fast, with their servers becoming empty within few years of their launch. Others, like Call of Duty games, serve to live until the next installation in the seemingly endless series is released. And sometimes, games such as Runescape and Team Fortress 2 manage to survive and maintain a significant player base well over a decade after launch. The success and failure of multiplayer games has long been defined by a number of factors other the quality of the product, such marketing, the willingness of the developers and publishers to support and update their product, the size of the initial player base and the number of hardcore fans. But lately, another factor has been gaining more and more influence upon what huge amounts of players will be giving a try and which game will become the next big thing: the popularity among streamers and influencers.

Big streamers such as xQc, Pokimane, DrLupo, Ninja and others have been playing an increasingly defining role in what we play and when we play. While their choices do not have an overwhelming impact (hardcore League of Legends and CS:GO fans aren't likely to just leave their games and switch to Fortnite or COD: Warzone just because a streamer plays them), they are capable of swaying thousands upon thousands of their followers to try out a game, especially if it's cheap or free. Spreading through Twitch, Twitter and countless Discord servers, the initial buzz snowballs into an avalanche of tweets and posts, creating the impression that everyone is playing this amazing new game. This in turn makes even more people jump in on the bandwagon and creates a giant surge of players – even if it's not going to last very long.

While the most famous examples of "hype gaming" are, without any doubt, Fall Guys and Among Us, two casual indie games which became household names in the last couple of months, the trend goes a couple of years earlier than that. Indeed, Fortnite became the first game that was "made" by both its overwhelming popularity among streamers (even those who were far from the FPS genre gave it a try) and its dominance on social media. _Fortnite_'s rapid climb to popularity, it's total domination on Twitch for the large part of 2018 and a good chunk of 2019 lead the game to become a popular subject of memes, both positive and negative. "Where We Dropping, Boys," Fortnite Burger, the Orange Shirt Kid and even Minecraft Good, Fortnite Bad are just a few of many.

Before Fall Guys and Among Us came to be, several more games became the big winners of the streamer and social media hype. Within one month after its release, the 2019 battle royale game Apex Legends had over 50 million players who gave it a try. In other words, nearly one percent of the Earth's entire population played the game at one point or another.

However, after the initial hype subsided, the game lost the majority of its initial player base, reflected by its view numbers on Twitch. Also, unlike Fortnite, Apex Legends did not manage to build a mainstream meme presence (apart from everyone and their mother hating on the Mozambique Shotgun for a few weeks).

In 2020, Apex Legends's fate was repeated by Call of Duty: Warzone and VALORANT, with VALORANT even managing to beat Apex Legends' 674,000 Twitch viewers peak with over 1.7 million simultaneous viewers. However, VALORANT also followed Apex Legends' rapid drop-off in players.

The instant success of all these games created a rare opportunity that only movie blockbusters such as Star Wars and Avengers could enjoy before: they became a mainstream pop culture phenomena. The fact that so many people tried the games or at least saw somebody else play them lifted them above the in-the-know bubble of the gaming community into the mainstream – because now everybody was in-the-know. You either learned what the games were about, or got doomed to lag behind the social media like an out-of-touch dinosaur.

The mainstream status of the games meant that everybody had the carte blanche to meme them and expect the mainstream audience to appreciate these memes. When Warzone was at its peak, memes about Gulag, the 1v1 map in which two dead players fought compete for the right to come back to the game into the game and fight another day, became omnipresent on Twitter and Instagram, and it was the mainstream popularity of the game was that enabled it.

#KimJongUn returning from the gulag #KIMJONGUNDEAD pic.twitter.com/lTz6PtuwzT

— Jack Cohen (@Jack_Cohen17) April 25, 2020

After the Takeshi's Castle-inspired battle royale game Fall Guys caught the attention of streamers in early August 2020, the game repeated the story of its AAA predecessors, but not without its own twist. Unlike the battle royale shooters, Fall Guys was a casual experience that even those who haven't even touched video games before could enjoy. Fall Guys beat Apex Legends' peak with over 700,000 simultaneous viewers, and went even further ahead in its social media domination, with August being the month when arguable everybody on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit saw at least one meme, fan art or post related to Fall Guys.

While it's the new games that are usually the winners of hype gaming, it's not always the case. The big and the most recent example that shows that old games also have a shot at rising to the stars is the mafiaesque Among Us. Released in 2018, Among Us has one or two players playing as Impostors trying to kill everybody on the ship while avoiding being discovered and forcibly ejected into the open space.

It was really the party format that helped Among Us get where it is today: seeing your favorite streamers play together, become increasingly paranoid and scream at each other over Discord is great entertainment if nothing else. Much like Fall Guys, Among Us appealed to the casual audience, even more so thanks to the fact that the game is available on mobile and is free there. Almost unnoticed on Twitch until late July 2020, the game snowballed into a popular culture phenomenon within two months, with nearly every variety streamer giving it a try. As of mid-September 2020, the game hasn't even probably peaked on Twitch, and a day doesn't go by without one's twitter feed filled to the brim with Among Us memes, videos and fan art.

Be it casual party games or less forgiving shooters, hype gaming is able to turn video games into a mainstream phenomena, enabling people to share memes and jokes about the game with confidence that their subs will understand what they are referring to. And since it's unlikely that streaming culture will go into decline any time soon, it's safe to say that we'll be seeing more games, both casual and hardcore and old and new, becoming social media leviathans.