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As ‘Slither.io’ Goes Viral, Game’s Creator Scrambles to Keep Up
- blatant 10y agoWarning: Pay-walled a article.
- mabbo 10y agoIt's such a simple, wonderful game. There's a few key details that I think distill it into a masterpiece. 1. A three year old could learn to play in minutes. Simple to learn, harder to master. 2. Your best runs last the longest, so as a fraction of your overall time played your better ones are the biggest portion. You remember winning a lot of the time. 3. It's absolutely pure animal player vs player. There is no chat, no real teams, no organization, just outplaying one another. I hope future game makers learn from this.
- heed 10y agoI enjoyed the game, but it became extremely boring after reaching the #1 spot on a leaderboard. I probably played for 30 minutes before deleting the app. Kudos to the developer for his success though.
- TTPrograms 10y agoIt has some major issues unfortunately, including massive input lag and frequent latency spikes. This makes most deaths that occur feel very random, rather than the result of skilled play. These issues were around months ago, so I'm not sure it's simply the result of any recent virality referenced in this article.
- syngrog66 10y agolag/latency most likely due to combination of high/increasing traffic plus imperfect arch/code. but traffic is a Very Good Problem to have for a game, especially if his revenue comes from advertising, and is passive. if I were him I'd focus first on identifying & fixing his bottlenecks, and consult a cheatsheet list like this to see if he's overlooked anything: http://synisma.neocities.org/perf_scale_cheatsheet.pdf http://synisma.neocities.org/perf_scale_cheatsheet.pdf
- GunlogAlm 10y agoLag spikes -- yes, definitely, and they're annoying. But are you sure the 'input lag' you're referring to isn't the small (by design) delay between moving the mouse and the snake moving?
- chillacy 10y agoAlthough some games are full of bots, and my better games have been in those since it's easier.
- icebraining 10y agoIt's similar to Agar.io, except with snakes instead of circles.
- bigtunacan 10y agoI definitely see the similarity. That said, I never liked agar.io. Slither.io's ability for the smallest snake to kill the one at the top of the leaderboard makes for a more rewarding experience IMHO.
- leppr 10y agoIt's interesting how replacing a single component from otherwise the same concept makes for 2 games with completely different mechanics, strategies and kinaesthetics.
- jbhatab 10y agoagreed. Deep and introspective analysis aside, it's agar.io with snakes.
- urza 10y agoCould someone paste the text somewhere please?
- Axsuul 10y agoClick web link
- curiousgal 10y agohttp://i.imgur.com/Kfg1spC.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Kfg1spC.jpg
- urza 10y agoI would like to read something like this https://hookrace.net/blog/ddnet-evolution-architecture-technology/ https://hookrace.net/blog/ddnet-evolution-architecture-techn... from slither.io creator(s) About their infrastructure, sw, hw architecture.. revenue model.. etc.. could be very interesting read
- curiousgal 10y agoIt's basically Tron meets Agar.io
- syngrog66 10y agothis indie game designer's perspective: almost all new/modern "hit" computer games are just a revival of the mechanics/elements of some previous hit game. sometimes with little tweaks, always with a different superficial skin. very rare that a new hit game is truly novel.
- arca_vorago 10y ago"To make money, Mr. Howse relied on advertising. Players can spend $3.99 to remove ads that appear when a player loses. He doesn’t sell virtual currency or power-ups, surprising given how vital in-app purchases are to mobile gaming. Most users put up with the ads, he said." As a person who is working on a game project on the side (that I have been neglecting recently due to time pressures), I find this double revenue model very interesting. So the game is free to play, but with ads upon death, of which he gets less than a penny. "Those ads drop less than a penny in Mr. Howse’s pocket each time a player sees one. But with an average of 460 million fails a day" So he is making mad revenue just off the ads, and then the percentage of players who pay add up too... all while providing an entertaining game that people like. While I have always hated ads in game, I have a feeling this is going to be the main model for the next few years given the dominance of advertising. It saddens me that novel content creators don't get as rewarded for pure exchange of product (here is game, here is money), but I can't really say I blame them for starting to adopt this model, and to be frank it is making me reconsider my traditional approach of pay once.
- hesdeadjim 10y agoI am 100% sure all his revenue is from ads. Every free product we've released in 7 years, including Paper Toss with 100 mil+ downloads, has made next to nothing from a "no-ads" in-app purchase. Full screen incentivized video ads however are worth a lot now with companies like Supercell spending millions a day on them.
- laydros 10y agoI figured no one made money off the in-app purchase because so few vendors even give the option anymore. I make a living off software development myself, and I love the "pay to remove ads" model. I play a game a while with ads to decide if I like it, then I pay a couple of bucks. It's like a demo to me. And ads drive me nuts.
- calsy 10y agoMobile Strike anyone?
- gortok 10y agoWSJ reading tip: if you type the title into Google, you can click that link and read the WSJ article for free.
- maxerickson 10y agoThere's a link to that search on each HN discussion page, it's the "web" link under the story link.
- personjerry 10y agoWow, I've never noticed that. That should be highlighted or something. Actually maybe there should be a tutorial to HN.
- curiousgal 10y agoI think it's better to find it on your own. It gives you a mild euphoria. Like when I found out what noprocrast was for.
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- boulos 10y agoI'm curious how much traffic he's sending (it doesn't sound bandwidth intensive): > Mr. Howse spent weeks finding server space in regions where demand bubbled up. He is trying to save money by avoiding cloud services from the likes of Amazon Inc. or Alphabet Inc. “It’s incredibly expensive because of the amount of bandwidth this game uses,” he said. [Edit with more quotes] > Three months ago, Steven Howse struggled to pay rent. Now, the 32-year-old developer is trying to keep his hit videogame running smoothly as it pulls in more than $100,000 in revenue daily. > “Slither.io” is profitable, Mr. Howse said. He pays about $15,000 monthly for online-hosting services, and shares revenue with Apple Inc. and Google. So $3M/month in revenue on $15k/month in hosting ;). I'm sure much of the $100k/day is recent and likely a fad, but I guess I'm surprised that he's apparently spent weeks trying to get capacity while his revenue is skyrocketing "just" to keep his bandwidth bill down. (It seems like all the networking would be effectively player state back and forth, not assets). Disclosure: I work at Google on Cloud.
- vthallam 10y ago>I'm sure much of the $100k/day is recent This is probably the reason and the unexpected scale. Initially as a broke(referring to part where struggled to pay rent) 32 year old developer, you don't want to share spend a lot on AWS/GCP. If the revenue stream is consistent, I'm sure, he is going to move to either of the platforms. So much less headache that way.
- ebsalberto 10y agoWrong. He isn't even running on cloud anyway. For this type of workload, bare-metal is 10 times a better option, both in terms of performance and costs.
- mullen 10y agoThe "problem" this dev is having is what AWS was built for. He could get his OS of choice, customize it with his server software, then copy the AMI to various regions, spin up dedicated instances as he needed them, use what he needed in various regions and direct players to their closest server. Turn on and turn off servers as need arises and they are close to players. After his game settles down to predictable traffic, he can move to some bare cost ISP. He would not have to call anyone and within a hour or so he could have a game that gave a much better experience. What kills a flavor of the month game like this is being laggy and having an awful experience. The only thing I think would be an issue is the bandwidth charges. I wonder why his game creates so much traffic?
- Xeiliex 10y agoIf by viral you mean stealth promoted on youtube followed by blatant AD's staring those youtubers, then yes this is viral. The only accomplishment here is that someone figured out how to make serious cash from multiplayer snake.
- d23 10y agoSo it's still a major accomplishment? And he's even more cunning by doing it purposefully?
- lawpoop 10y agoI don't think OP is saying it's not an accomplishment, just not that it was a viral accomplishment.
- ben_jones 10y agoRaise your hand if you wouldn't of done exactly what he did given the opportunity..
- pjlegato 10y agoHow do you stealth promote on YouTube?
- randycupertino 10y agoIt's crazy fun, though. Very relaxing after a tough day's work.
- mavhc 10y agoI played it for a little while, but it's too easy to die, I'd prefer it if you rapidly shrank while touching another snake, giving you a few seconds to turn out of they way. Was popular with my students for a few days, but they're back to agar.io now
- Swennemans 10y agoI expected to be a Firebase based app. Seems like a good match.
- srtjstjsj 10y agoThis is a submarine ad, not a real story about scaling.
- ascendantlogic 10y agoAt the risk of sounding naive, nothing jumped out at me as to how he's making revenue. What am I missing?
- rexf 10y agoThe article mentions ads & the ability to pay to remove ads.
- irongloves 10y agoEvery time you lose (you hit a snake) you are showed a full screen ad. And you lose a lot during a 30-min play time. Multiply that for millions of players every day. EDIT: The WSJ article mentions an average of 460 million game losts a day (which means about 460 million ad impressions a day...you know, some of us have adblockers on android)