“Would the pandemic have gone differently if Boris Johnson had played Plague Inc before COVID? Maybe it would have done,” says Plague Inc creator James Vaughan.
The Ndemic Creations founder has had an eventful few years. His game about spreading a pandemic, Plague Inc, was already a hit before the world was in the grip of COVID in 2020. But as a real-life pandemic spread across the globe, Plague Inc sales suddenly shot up again, earning his small 10-person studio an estimated $6-7m in a matter of months.
Vaughan tells us he first saw a big spike in downloads from China in January 2020, and the rest of the world soon followed – as if the game was a sort of “early warning system”.
Plague Inc sales, like COVID itself, peaked in March and April of 2020. Then it suddenly disappeared from Chinese stores overnight. “China pulled it off the store…we had a simultaneous iOS and Steam removal. We never found out why. It was just a mysterious government agency that removed it all,” Vaughan tells us.
“The majority of the revenue spike was in China, and then it got pulled. So effectively we got a year’s worth of revenue from it, and then it went to nothing.”
As COVID started spreading in January 2020, Vaughan dropped his contacts at the World Health Organisation and US health agency the CDC a line to alert them to the rising downloads. He wanted to see how he and his team could help, later opening up an in-game donations system so Plague Inc players could send money to the WHO directly. Ndemic also donated $250k to the cause.
Ndemic Creations also enlisted those agencies’ expertise as it developed its ‘Cure’ expansion, in the hope that it might educate players as well as entertain. It released the expansion for free. “We left God knows how many millions on the table by giving away the Cure expansion,” says Vaughan – but he says he doesn’t regret a thing.
“We had so many messages from people saying it reassured them, or it helped them understand it, or it made it feel more manageable,” says Vaughan. “We’ve had people who trained to become doctors and infectious disease experts who played Plague Inc, even.”
It’s this educational side of the game that brings us to Boris Johnson. In early 2020, the then-prime minister resisted calls to enter lockdown as COVID spread, despite most of Europe having already shut down. That decision effectively resulted in the UK having one of the worst COVID death rates per million in the western world.
It’s a scenario millions had already played through in Plague Inc, says Vaughan. “We have a whole aspect in Plague Inc of your authority and how people will accept what you’re saying – because you can start the game straight away, and you can put the whole world into lockdown and make everybody wear masks, hand wash, social distance…everything.”
“And you will see in the game that people will do it for a little while, but you haven’t bought them into it. Eventually they’ll reject it, there will be unrest, and that will make everything worse. Often people say, as soon as it happened in China, why didn’t they just shut down everything? The world doesn’t work like that, and neither do our games.”
Put in blunt terms, Vaughan says that if you haven’t got enough people dying from your pandemic, you can’t get people to buy into lockdowns. “One thing that Plague Inc does very well, from an educational point of view, is it helps people understand these concepts,” he says. “Would the pandemic have gone differently if Boris Johnson had played Plague Inc before COVID? Maybe it would have done.”
Ndemic clearly likes to tie its work into current affairs. In 2018 it launched Rebel Inc, a game about insurgencies partly inspired by uprisings in the Arab world several years before. And most recently, in November 2024, it launched After Inc, a simulation of a post-apocalyptic world that was ravaged by, you guessed it, a pandemic.
But overall, Vaughan says despite having turned down multiple offers to to buy the company over the years, Ndemic never really profited from the pandemic – and he wouldn’t have wanted it to, either.
“We had a very big Chinese spike, and then China obviously kicked us out of the App Store,” says Vaughan.
“So it was very noticeable and very impactful. But it wasn’t fundamentally changing the fortunes of the company – we could have made lots of money from it if we had released our ‘cure’ expansion and charged for it right away, but we gave it away for free for two years because we didn’t want to be benefitting from the pandemic.”
“To be very honest, COVID was a very difficult situation for us to navigate,” adds Vaughan. “We could have very easily been pulled off the App Store worldwide. There was a lot of danger for us as a company once the game was removed from China, and my focus was on surviving that and then doing what we can to help…we made a little bit more money, but longer term, it cost us more.”
