The Plague Inc creator felt uncomfortable making money from the pandemic

The game Plague Inc celebrates ten years and since its release in 2012, the game has had 180 million players where the peak was during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interview on reddit game creator James Vaughan talks about the game and its relationship to disease and the pandemic.

“Interestingly, Plague Inc has always got more popular whenever people get ill, eg When Plague Inc was #1 in Japan – we saw big spikes every time there was a bad flu outbreak. When Ebola was spreading in 2015, we saw a big worldwide spike in players. When Covid first started though we saw the biggest increase in players ever – it lasted for about a month and then went back down to normal levels.”

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Vaughan continues and explains that he felt very uncomfortable with how popular the game became during the pandemic.

“Awkward is putting it mildly! It felt very uncomfortable seeing all the fictional things I had put into the game playing out in real life. I want my games to do well because they are good games – not because of a serious global disaster,”

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This also led to Vaughan contacting the WHO and CEPI and developing the game Plague Inc: The Cure to help people understand viruses and the complexities of stopping a pandemic.

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