Osu! A Passion Project That’s Becoming a Phenomenon
Osu! is a big online free-to-play rhythm game and most likely, one you’ve never heard of. The game has been around for 12 years already and yet, it's a game you don't really hear much about even though it now has a huge growing community. There are two main reasons for this: first, it's a rhythm game. When you think of this kind of game, the titles that usually come to mind are Guitar Hero or Beat Saber.
This obscurity is actually surprising, because Osu! has over 13 million registered accounts with BILLIONS of submitted ranked plays, so why is it that you never heard of Osu!?
Most likely it’s because Osu! started as a passion project by its creator peppy and it was never meant to become a business so there was never any effort put into marketing the game.
Even today there's no marketing, and the only monetization Osu! has is something called a supporter tag which essentially is a donation you can make that impacts absolutely nothing in gameplay.
Speaking of gameplay, what exactly do you do in Osu!?
A simple description would be that you click circles to the beat. It’s a simple mechanic that's easy to learn but incredibly hard to master. Let me try to explain how it works.
A Simple Game Mechanic
In essence, all you have to do is use your mouse (or the more popular tool used in Osu! a pen with a drawing tablet) and put the cursor on top of the circle(A), then when the approach circle(B) closes in, usually following the beat of the music, you click it or tap it with a key. Easy, right?
It may seem easy at the start but as you go up in difficulty it becomes harder and harder to follow the circles and click them in time. There is a rating system for the “beatmaps” you can play that starts from 1 star all the way up to 10 stars; this acts as a general guideline to know the difficulty of a map. A very important thing to note is that these maps are created by players; there is a tool in-game every player has access to that allows them to create a map. This means all playable content in the game is made by the community for the community.
The reason there is no dedicated team creating maps is because of what I mentioned earlier; this was never meant to be a business, it was only a passion project that evolved into what it is today.
Today Osu! has thousands of players clicking circles all the time, due to a dedicated community around it that keeps the game alive and the continued work on developing a better game client by peppy and his team, Osu! has been growing steadily over the years.
But what is it that keeps players engaged with Osu! you ask? The answer is simple: this is an extremely competitive game.
PP System
Completing a map will award the player with something called Performance Points (PP); depending on the difficulty and your performance on a map you will be awarded a certain amount of PP.
This is the system used to rank players. The top 100 plays of a player will count towards a total PP amount that will be used to calculate their world ranking.
Also, remember that every map is made by the community, for a map to give ranked PP it must go through a submission process that's also managed by the community to receive a “Ranked” status, so this ensures a certain level of quality. All of this creates a very competitive environment, and as a bonus, you can even jump on multiplayer lobbies to directly compete with other players if you want.
This competitiveness is one of the main reasons the player base keeps growing not to mention the game is really fun, to a point that it’s addicting.
There’s something very satisfying about being able to beat a score you did the day before, or even finally being able to pass that one map that you have been trying for days or even weeks, all of this while listening to some really cool music.
What kind of music, you ask? Well, essentially any kind of music, since players can upload whatever they want you find a lot of different genres there but the most common is anime-related music. Unfortunately, if the music is copyrighted it's unlikely to ever be ranked as it could be pulled off the platform at any time.
In order to provide mappers (players that create maps) with a vast amount of songs free of copyright worries, peppy recently began licensing music to be used on Osu! with its featured artist project.
This is a vast library with music from all kinds of artists and even big names like Epica which is one of the biggest Symphonic Metal bands in the world. Some of these songs were even created specifically for this game.
All of these things together create the conditions that allow Osu! to naturally grow. But without its loyal community, none of this would have been possible.
Community
The community around Osu! is very peculiar; they are bound by both the love of rhythm games and anime culture in general.
On the game side, players value scores very highly, this comes from both the competitive nature of the game and the understanding of how hard it is to set good scores in difficult maps.
Every single year the top players keep pushing the boundaries of what is considered possible in Osu! by setting insane scores in search of reaching fame and glory with the community.
In this community, rank matters. The general term used to describe the skill of a player comes from their ranking. For example, the best title would be “Single Digit Player” this means you are on the top 9 so you only have one digit on your rank.
In general, if you can reach at least 5 digits (e.g. 99999) you will officially be considered a decent player. This is no easy feat. I would know because I'm a 5 digit player myself, and to put this into perspective, I have more than a thousand hours of playtime and I'm still a long way from reaching 4 digits.
The community may value rank a lot but it's very friendly towards new players, although if you want to contribute to the general conversation of Osu!, you better have the rank to show it or else no one will take you seriously.
This creates an interesting dynamic where the community ends up being very tight and reserved and yet very welcoming of new people.
Conclusion
Osu! is growing. When I started playing almost a year ago rare were the days when I would see more than 10k players online, right now on average there's more than 30k, that’s a huge growth in less than a year and I suspect it will keep rising.
So I guess if you want to try out Osu! now is a great time to do it. Just beware, once you start clicking those circles there's no going back, and who knows, maybe one day this could be you:
