11 ms·

Flappy Bird by the Numbers

279 points by zachwill 13y ago

antics 13y ago
What's interesting about a by-the-numbers account of Flappy Bird's success is how starkly apparent the weaknesses of the app store model of surfacing and distributing apps seem to be in retrospect. Think about it: the app store organizes apps almost exactly like web directories organized websites in the 90's -- there are human-curated catalogs, and a single store acts as a directory for essentially all known apps. It's like Yahoo! was in 1994. Considering that Flappy Bird was made popular by power users on other platforms (particularly YouTube), I think that this point is really important: the app store is probably not the best platform to surface new apps. A good exercise for entrepreneurs is to think of a better model. If anything, the success of Flappy Bird is one hell of an incentive to find out. (Also: if you have ideas about this, like me, we should have a chat.)
- fblp 13y ago
  Google play annotates and highlights apps that you or your friends have downloaded or rated. 'similar apps' is also a more modern way of surfacing content.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - antics 13y ago
    Sure, but how do you deal with the long tail? Flappy Bird is not an app that would have surfaced until it was well on its way to becoming what it is today (or was yesterday, I guess).
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Discovery in general is still a pretty knotty problem. Even Netflix, which has a relatively small pool of things to sort through, doesn't do a particularly good job of it. It often recommends things I have no interest in whatsoever, and conversely never recommends things I very much want to watch but have to find manually. It's practical to manually sort as a Netflix customer precisely because their pool is relatively shallow. But I wonder if their weak recommendations are due to that shallow pool, and that in the end there just aren't enough ratings for machine learning algorithms to actually work the way they're supposed to. There's obviously a lot of money in getting recommendations and discovery to actually work, but I wonder if everyone is on a path that's sort of condemned to failure due to lack of enough data. Dunno. Thinking out loud really. I know it's something I'm dissatisfied with pretty much across the board.
  - karmelapple 13y ago
    > Even Netflix ... doesn't do a particularly good job of [discovery]. I see this message repeated by a lot of tech people, but I feel like I get fairly good recommendations. Am I alone? What is it about the recommendations that seem bad? Is it because you know there is better content there but the metadata has somehow not categorized it properly for cross-referencing, or does it seem more like it's guessing from a shallow pool and trying to bubble up whatever content it can find, even if it's not a great match? Is there any kind of open source recommendation framework or standard? Couldn't Netflix publish the details of its algorithm, including which metrics it has, to help the community think up more ways to analyze? The value in Netflix right now is in the content, not in the recommendation engine. Looks like the competition Netflix used to host was ended in 2009... would be great if they started it again: http://www.netflixprize.com http://www.netflixprize.com
    - jmduke 13y ago
      I'd argue that Netflix is high-precision, low-recall: the quality of recommendations are usually good, but the recommendations themselves usually don't reflect the entire library.
    - waterlesscloud 13y ago
      I had a response written to this, but realized I haven't thought it through enough to respond meaningfully. I know I'm dissatisfied. I know it doesn't show me movies I very much want to see, and that it clutters my recommendations with a lot of things I'll never watch. My feeling is that it doesn't capture why I like the movies I like. The categories they've been refining over the years are likely an attempt to address that, but they seem to be missing the important information still. Hmm. PS- re the contest, there was a problem with the anonymized data being de-anonymized by researchers, so they couldn't make it available any more.
    - drabiega 13y ago
      Given my anecdotal experiences of this problem I would guess that Netflix's problem isn't a matter of figuring out what I would like, it's a matter of figuring out what I may not have seen yet. The problem is that the things that I am most likely to like based on my viewings are also the things that I am most likely to have already seen somewhere other than Netflix.
- MichaelAO 13y ago
  Great point. I've been considering working on a tool that tried to solve this problem for health apps. It would require the user to fill out a form that teases out information about their motivations, health goals, lifestyle, etc.(the more data the better the recommendation). They'd then receive an auto generated menu of apps that'd work specifically well for them. I've spent a lot of time talking to my Dad about healthcare (he's a doctor) and he never recommends mobile apps to his patients for weight loss or anything along those lines. I can't really blame him... there are tens of thousands of health apps. That might change if he had an online tool to send his patients to that did the heavy lifting of making an intelligent recommendation. Here's an interesting study that shows how doctors can be a powerful catalyst in this regard: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)61344-5/abstract http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... In the end, it'd just be an app recommendation engine for health. That aside, I 100% agree with what you're saying.
rismay 13y ago
I don't know if I agree with this. I was just talking to my friend about Flappy Bird reviews. When I first got Flappy Bird in early February, the button to rate the game was in the same place where I usually tapped to make the bird fly. Since the "Rate this App" button appeared so quickly after losing the game, I almost rated the app like 5 times in just a couple of minutes. I would like to see the different versions of the app and when this feature / bug was introduced.
- rismay 13y ago
  I should maybe add his response, "I knoooow, WTF. It's annoying. Why doesn't he just make that button, the "Play Again button?"
- dclara 13y ago
  Oh, you've caught a point. It's such a smart cheat!
- hnguyen 13y ago
  He's left handed (https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/431336238985920513 https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/431336238985920513).
  - crucialfelix 13y ago
    ^^^ hey look everybody, here he is ! but seriously best of luck to you if it is you. you should remake the game now with a black swan in place of yellow bird.
    - hnguyen 13y ago
      I'm not him. Just happen to be a Vietnamese with the same last name :) "Nguyen" is a common last name in Vietnam, like 40% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen).
blackhole 13y ago
What disturbs me most about this is the complete lack of empathy people have for the guy. Just look at the comments on the link explaining that Flappy Bird was removed from the app store. Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. They hurl insults like "weak" and "fragile" as though someone isn't allowed to be shy ever since the internet happened. The sheer amount of greed on display in debates about this game is deeply unnerving, and it seems as though modern culture has forgotten that there are many things that are more important than money. It seems as though our entire country is hopelessly addicted to accumulating more and more pieces of green paper, only to be puzzled when having a large number in their bank account fails to actually solve any of their problems.
- 10feet 13y ago
  > Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. It is not obsession with money, it is just confusion over it. I mean, it isn't that hard to ignore all the bad comments and emails, and a small price to pay for riches. There must be something else going on, and that is the bit that is frustrating, not knowing. Of course, it is completely up to him, and this is in no way justification for awful comments or messages to the dev.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    it isn't that hard to ignore all the bad comments and emails The gravity and emotional toll of receiving death threats and verbal harassment is often incredibly underestimated by those who haven't received them.
    - baddox 13y ago
      I think the commenter meant to literally ignore comments and emails, as in, don't read them.
  - corresation 13y ago
cliveowen 13y ago
I think the main lesson here is that the App Store isn't immune to the bias that plagues most online communities, namely that suddenly popular content benefits from its high position in the system (be that a forum board or section of the App Store) and then it skyrockets as people trust the often naive equation number of users=quality. This either creates successful franchises or an endless stream of one-hit wonders that perpetuates the winner-takes-all mechanism we all have come to know. An ideal system would surface quality content while ensuring equal footing for up-and-comers and wannabe competitors. It looks to me that the answer lies in a complex ranking algorithm that makes heavy use of statistical analysis instead of a set of unproven assumptions and a devil-may-care attitude toward keeping things simple to meet the lowest expectations and nothing more.
- raganwald 13y ago
  A lot of the dynamics you're describing here on Hacker News also apply to Hacker News. It's the same problem: Surface quality content and don't allow the items on the front page to choke out new submissions just because they're on the front page attracting all the votes.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
arn 13y ago
Bad/Funny Flappy Bird reviews became a meme on its own: http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behind-the-success-of-the-1-app-flappy-bird/ http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behin... So I don't know if it's as simple to suggest it was a pay-for-review scheme, but rather just its own thing. Same thing happened on Amazon milk reviews: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09milk.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09milk.html
- objclxt 13y ago
  I don't think it's being suggested that a pay-for-review scheme was what caused it to be a hit. The game was available on the store for seven months without getting much traction. The developer probably thought he would try some kind of pay-per-review/promotion service to get a few more downloads. This got the game into the charts, but it only really began to take off because unlike many of its peers using pay-per-review the game actually had a hook that got people playing. In this case the pay-per-review was a tiny catalyst for vast growth. Of course, this assumes the developer used some sort of paid promotion service.
  - arn 13y ago
    But he denies that to be the case. And if it was his goal, then why is it pulling it off the app store? Despite how rare it is to have a true grassroots viral hit, I think that's what happened in this case.
corresation 13y ago
Some externals that had a huge influence on Flappy Bird are Vine and then a couple of huge play along YouTubers (such as "pewdiepie"). I made the analogy before that Flappy Bird is the 2 girls 1 cup of games, and while I saved myself from ever seeing that video, it became famous in reaction videos. Exactly the same thing happened with Flappy Bird, first on Vine in early January, and then as the mega-YouTubers picked it up in late January. It was likely pewdiepie who yielded the enormous uptick at the end of January.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Interesting. So there were a lot of reaction-style vines of people playing Flappy Bird?
  - corresation 13y ago
    Absolutely. There are thousands of them. Indeed, the whole "this game is super frustrating" was a meme the author of the game picked up on and leveraged in December. e.g. https://twitter.com/BarlowConnor/statuses/412712696102932480 https://twitter.com/BarlowConnor/statuses/412712696102932480 (Dong is one of the retweeters)
  - psyklic 13y ago
    Typically when a product shows up all over Vine like Flappy Bird did, at least some of them were paid for. Any evidence of this?
- mcphilip 13y ago
  It's worth noting that pewdiepie has 22+ million subscribers. The flappy birds video[1] from January 27th already has 9+ million views. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQz6xhlOt18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQz6xhlOt18
  - arn 13y ago
    Ya, but the pew pew video wasn't posted until well after the game hit number 1.
kevando 13y ago
The nerd in me is curious about factors that lead to higher scores. With so many data points, I'd love to see how android vs iphone users scored and if the color of flappy (or "time of day") had any impact on your score. Or how many other people popped a bottle of champagne when they reached level 6...
forrestthewoods 13y ago
I find the endless accusations of a bot network quite tiring. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. Either way there is zero evidence to support such a claim. My favorite part of this whole saga is from the polygon article. Nguyen via Twitter: "Press people are overrating the success of my games. It is something I never want. Please give me peace." Polygon: "We've reached out to Nguyen for comment and will update accordingly." Good job everyone. Good job.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  The article presents some (non-conclusive) evidence of a sudden, steady influx of reviews, and more is coming up: https://sensortower.com/flappy-bird-scripted-reviews-analysi.. https://sensortower.com/flappy-bird-scripted-reviews-analysi.... What kind of game developer doesn't want it's creations to succeed?
  - oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
    He's explicitly stated in an interview that he didn't do anything to game reviews, so do you stand by what you say, or are you calling him a liar? Not very game developer would resort to nefarious tactics for their own profit. Why does everyone have to look for a cause behind every event - can't you just accept that something might just have ... happened?
    - ricardobeat 13y ago
      I'm not taking any conclusions yet. The episode is unusual, accepting that "things just happened" is not my cup of tea. As a developer I'm interested in the dynamics of the app store rankings, if it's still possible for an indie dev to succeed without "help"; and as a former media student, how exactly a little crappy game clone went viral and made it to the top spot in a month. If it turns out it was just a fluke, still more interesting it is.
      - DanBC 13y ago
        It was linked to by a major YouTuber. It is a tiny simple free app. You do one thing, you get one number back. A bit like nananca bike crash. These very simple games are great for the "just one more go" factor, and the bragging rights of "hey! I just beat your top score". Over analysis could lead to incorrect conclusions so I'd be wary of any analysis that explained Flappy Bird without explaining the failure of all the other similar games.
yeukhon 13y ago
I really doubt anyone really got 9999. Not being cynical but what is the odd of so many ppl getting that thigh score?
- Nicholas_C 13y ago
  If a player can get one point a second that's 2.78 hours of continuous play that would be needed to score 9999.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    But how many try will it take to get pass 9998 and 9997? The precision there. I am sure someone may have that skill to do it, but it's really questionable whether all of them are legitimate or not. And in fact, are they all legitimate... the highest in real life I know is 200.
  - gojomo 13y ago
    'Desert Bus' requires 8 hours to score one point... http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-worst-video-game-ever-created.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-w... ...and people play it for days, for charity!
    - Nicholas_C 13y ago
      Wow. That is hilarious. I was going to comment that it should be an Apple/Android app just for shits and giggles but after a cursory search I discovered that it already is! And it costs $1!
- idProQuo 13y ago
  Hacking scoreboards is pretty easy for people who are skilled at reverse engineering. Once one of these people figures out how to do it (usually by mocking up the high score message the game sends to the server) they release their crack on Cydia, and thousands of people take advantage of it.
Mikeb85 13y ago
I get it. Here you have a developer who just wanted to make games, and maybe a bit of money. He creates a hit, by accident, with a game that has addicting gameplay (and it is, I personally love it). Then everyone in the media calls his game crap and accuses him of cheating the system (without producing any proof). I'd quit too.
- MBCook 13y ago
  I'm sure he was inundated with people wanting to buy it, license it, claim the made it, asking for tips, etc. I'd imagine this kind of thing basically ruins your email address. Then when he said he didn't like the attention, more hate came. Then when he said he was pulling it, death threats came. Reminds me of people who win the lottery. All their friends just want something, charities start bugging them, they can't be left alone. I feel sorry for him.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    I feel sorry for him too, but it seems like it should have been obvious that publicly pulling the game was not the way to make things better. It sucks, but the only way to make it go away is to just ignore it all for a while. The internet will find its new obsession in short order, and Flappy Bird's 15 minutes of fame will be over. Anything he does to try to avoid attention will just make it go on longer.
- jordsmi 13y ago
  I don't see the point in quitting. I'd rather just not read twitter for a few weeks(can't be that hard) and rake in the cash.
  - fhd2 13y ago
    Maybe he doesn't care about money first and foremost? If nothing else, this move demonstrates it. Granted, he probably made about a million by now, which will presumably last quite long where he lives. Still, he could have just kept it online and would probably never have to worry about money again.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I think the most interesting part of this is what the author points out: this is a story about a normal developer riding one hell of a roller-coaster. On top of that, let's face it: the game ain't that much. It's not like there was some special secret sauce he put in there. I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there. So this story, aside from the marketing moves (which I would love to find out about as long as my best 40K other HN friends do not at the same time), is just about winning the lottery. Guy writes app, wins the lottery. This kind of lottery keeps poor schmucks writing apps for walled garden playstores. You get ten thousand people slaving away over little apps, each one hoping to be this guy. He's the guy in the casino who hits on the slots. The casino definitely wants to make sure all the rubes see the pile of money he gets.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  "I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there." I don't know that this is true. Or maybe it's true for "simple and playable", but maybe they're missing the "fun and addictive" qualities that made Flappy Bird work. There's a lot of subtle things that made Flappy Bird a game people enjoyed- the exact responses of the control, the timing and spacing of the obstacles, the quickness of the games, the ease of restarting, and so on. If any of that had been slightly off, it might not have made it. I'm not at all sure he got all that right intentionally, it might well be he just got the balances right through accident. But I do think the precise qualities of the game did matter, and I don't think there's a huge number of games out there that could have done just as well.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    It's a mistake to cast these things in absolutes. Hopefully I didn't do that. Of course, all those things you mention are important. Critical, even. But appstores are not meritocracies, no more than the music industry is. You've got to be working at the top of your game, getting all the details right, and even then 1) you've got a small chance of making it big, and 2) somebody with less skill and execution might do much better than you do. These aren't reasons to give up, just to understand the risks involved. This market exists to extract the maximum amount of developer work for the minimum amount of money. That way the consumers love their little gadgets more -- and will buy even more. It does not exist to make really great developers a decent living. (Although that's certainly possible)
gabemart 13y ago
I think the story of this game exemplifies the fact that content needs a minimum amount of attention to reveal it's true value. The journey of Flappy Bird appears to me like this: Stage 1: Almost no attention, almost no growth Stage 2: Some kind of grey market paid downloads / ratings service Stage 3: Attention of minimum critical mass of early consumers (increase in audience of 1 or perhaps 2 orders of magnitude) Stage 4: Attention of influencers on other platforms, especially pewdiepie on youtube (increase in audience by a couple of orders of magnitude) Stage 5: Attention by large community of enthusiasts (increase in audience by a couple of orders of magnitude) Stage 6: Mass market attention where each stage is dependent on the one before it, with the exception of stage 2, which is performed externally. What's interesting to me is that the qualities the game possesses, which were sufficient to carry it from stage 3 to stage 6 without promotion on the part of the dev, were not sufficient to propel it from stage 1 to stage 3. We could say that the true quality of the game was unknown in stage 1. My personal opinion is that the vast majority of content created languishes in the equivalent of stage 1 for its particular ecosystem. Of this content, the vast majority will be garbage, a small minority will be reasonable and a tiny minority will have the potential to be a widespread hit. But of this last group, most or all of it will never emerge from stage 1 because stage 1 does not provide it with enough attention to separate it from the rest of the (bad) stage 1 content. Increasingly I think that the journey to stage 1 to stage 3 is the most important, most difficult and most overlooked part of the progression. For example, when something is submitted to HN, from my anecdotal observation it will typically get something like 5-10 simultaneous visitors from the new page. If it gets a minimum critical mass of votes to hit the front page, this will increase immediately to something like 50-100 simultaneous viewers and increase from there. But often, it only takes 3-5 upvotes for it to hit the front page. So the relatively trivial actions of the small critical mass of early consumers has an extraordinarily large effect on the dissemination of the content. Indeed, as a content creator, it's often struck me that the actions of those first 3-5 people have an equivalent significance, in terms of the world's experience of my content, to me as the creator. And if you create good content, then just getting to the front page is by far the most difficult part of the process, because once there you will naturally attract upvotes from the vastly increased exposure. But with only a few random bits of cosmic entropy set differently, the creator could create exactly the same content, fail to get those first 3-5 votes, and the number of views on the article/app/etc. could be 10 rather than 10,000 or 100,000. In my experience, lots of platforms follow the same model. Reddit is a very obvious one, but the same holds to for trying to get press interest: so much depends upon the decisions of a few key journalists, and that decision may depend on how many other emails hit their inbox that hour, or whether or not they've had their coffee yet, or some other particle of background entropy. This isn't a criticism of the press, it's just a consequence of the current system. The same is true for people who run influential blogs or social media accounts with large followings, or newsletters. The problem is that there is less attention available per item of content than the minimum quantity of attention needed to rate the quality of that content well. When I create something new, my worry is never "Boy, I hope that people don't simply dislike this," it's always "Boy, I hope that enough people see this to give it a shot of achieving its potential, whatever that turns out to be." If it turns out people don't like it, which is of course always a possibility, that's fairly easy to handle. If it disappears into obscurity, that's much more difficult to accept. When I create content now, my promotion strategy is 99% focused on that first stage. If it reaches that critical mass of attention among a small number of early, influential people, I feel like my job is done and the chips should fall as they may. If it reaches that initial critical mass, people will want to write press stories about it and post it on social media and ask for interviews and tell their friends about it, assuming its any good. This may be an obvious conclusion, but the interesting part, for me, is that the initial critical mass is much smaller, much more random and much more difficult to achieve than most people realize.
jsonmez 13y ago
I would guess there was done kind of foul play and Apple said cut that out, here is a check for x amount of dollars. Just take the app down and let's forget about this.
api 13y ago
This illustrates an important point: Information costs nothing to replicate, but it's attention that is the great scarce commodity of the information age. I expect to see extreme escalation in the sophistication of methods for getting peoples' attention in the coming years.
midhir 13y ago
A few years ago I'd a much more humble experience with virality. I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and make a landing page for people to play with it. Nobody went to it. For months. Like not one person. It's still online today, although I've obviously broken the plugin at some point [1]. Months later my jaw hit the floor when I woke up to an inbox full of emails about this thing. The page had had thousands upon thousands of hits. Not from Belfast, but from NY and SF. It had been featured on a ton of blogs, discussions etc, all in the 6 hours or so I'd been asleep. Traffic had peaked, but it kept coming. A friend we hadn't seen in a while called into our little co-working space to tell me "that thing you put on Hacker News" had been on the front page for hours. I'd never even heard of HN at this point! There was no rhyme nor reason to any of this. The page had been available for months. All I can surmise is that something lit the touchpaper that started a chain reaction. And that I've a lot to learn about how virality works and what makes it function. It makes me wonder did he really engage in some grey market stuff to push Flappy Bird a little. I kind of wonder why he would fork out for something like that when the precedent would indicate he wasn't onto a winner with this game. In retrospect we know he had a great game, the potential for serious chain-reaction style virality was there, maybe the spark that lit the touch-paper was something innocuous that no-one would ever guess? [1]: http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/ http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/
jbeja 13y ago
To be honest like realy honest, i couldn't careless. The guy was making more money than me and given my current situation, i can't feel not even the most tiny drop of empathy for him. Don't even like the game.
kimonos 13y ago
I love Flappy Bird. Period.
liamsalcido 13y ago
I feel that instead of taking the game down he could use the money that he was getting from the game and give it to charity. That way he could still live the simple life that he wanted while doing something positive as well.
stasy 13y ago
But the question is, what did he do in December that jump started his downloads? Or, if he didn't do anything, what happened that started the rise in downloads/reviews?
JabavuAdams 13y ago
I think people are unwilling to accept luck as an explanation. This might especially be true for the HN audience, because so many of us work so hard hoping to have a success like this.
- fhd2 13y ago
  Well, at least in the (indie) gaming industry, it seems to be generally admitted. It's called "app store lottery" for a reason. And there's certainly not much survivorship bias going on.
rexreed 13y ago
In the linked article, the writer claims that by using AdMob, he left $1M on the table... I'm curious - where does this claim come from? The fact that he could have sold the app? Or is there a different untapped revenue stream?
wnevets 13y ago
Im convinced more people talk about this game than actually play it.
ja27 13y ago
So removing the app from the store doesn't turn off the ad revenue unless he kills his ad account. Removing it could be kind of a shrewd way to boost downloads one last time before people move on.
- fhd2 13y ago
  Even then, I'm pretty sure his revenues from this will be insignificant in a short time. This certainly seems like it lives from new users trying it and accidentally touching ads. The few power users that will still be around one day after it's taken off the stores probably won't matter revenue-wise. And I can imagine that he'd lose all his money if he killed the account.
mromanuk 13y ago
Obviously, this is the ultimate conclusion: 1. Make Flappy Bird 2. 3. Profits
fhd2 13y ago
I don't hate the guy, but what does get me is that some unethical paid download service and a whole lot of luck seemed to be the deciding factors for success, certainly not the game's quality. I wonder if it's gonna get better or worse in the near term. Pretty discouraging if you make games.
overgard 13y ago
Flappy Bird is pretty much the definition of a black swan. I hope people don't take too much away from it other than: huh, that's weird.
frou_dh 13y ago
Flappy Bird's the first app with onscreen banner advertising I've happened upon for years and my god it's disgusting to have these crappy looking ads constantly sliding onto the top of the screen. I sincerely hope paid or otherwise bankrolled apps continue to be prevalent.
josephlord 13y ago
The most important number about Flappy Bird is 4. From dying you can be back flying again in less than 4 seconds and be back at the first obstacle in less than 8 seconds. There are many games that should learn from that.
1337biz 13y ago
The most interesting question to me is what is you guys' experience with seeding app store reviews? It seems that it definitely worked in that case (any many maybe more we don't know about). Are there some white hat review services, with people that actually download the app? Or is it all just black bot spammer'y?
FollowSteph3 13y ago
What was his marketing experiment?
j_m_b 13y ago
If "getting famous" is such a devastating thing for an app developer, quit making games for popular devices. There is plenty of scientific computing projects that are far more interesting and have tiny audiences... lack of fame surely awaits you!
- lmm 13y ago
  In fairness the whole app feels like someone experimenting with building something simple for the iOS platform rather than trying to make a mega-successful game.
cognivore 13y ago
This is a good example of the "Lemming Economy" that mobile phones have created, and which I cannot heap on enough derision. The Lemming Economy follows a model where dozens upon dozens up near pointless applications are created in an attempt find just something that will get enough momentum to drive an ever increasing number of lemmings over the cliff (purchase). Upon succeeding more lemmings scramble to create copy-cats of the game to cash in on the stampede. There's no point except to try and generate cash out of they prevailing whims of the lemmings. This model neither creates a viable business model (because you can't rely on quality equaling sales) nor useful software (because that doesn't drive the lemmings over the cliff). Maybe Flappy Birds isn't horrible, I don't know. But the developer obviously didn't like getting caught in the stampede and all of a sudden getting exposed to the general population. I would have taken down the app, too.
quasarj 13y ago
Interesting article.. but I'd be careful about scraping anything from iTunes. This could easily be classified as wire fraud in the US (and there is already precedent with someone being convicted).

279 points by zachwill 13y ago

What's interesting about a by-the-numbers account of Flappy Bird's success is how starkly apparent the weaknesses of the app store model of surfacing and distributing apps seem to be in retrospect. Think about it: the app store organizes apps almost exactly like web directories organized websites in the 90's -- there are human-curated catalogs, and a single store acts as a directory for essentially all known apps. It's like Yahoo! was in 1994. Considering that Flappy Bird was made popular by power users on other platforms (particularly YouTube), I think that this point is really important: the app store is probably not the best platform to surface new apps. A good exercise for entrepreneurs is to think of a better model. If anything, the success of Flappy Bird is one hell of an incentive to find out. (Also: if you have ideas about this, like me, we should have a chat.)

fblp 13y ago
Google play annotates and highlights apps that you or your friends have downloaded or rated. 'similar apps' is also a more modern way of surfacing content.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- antics 13y ago
  Sure, but how do you deal with the long tail? Flappy Bird is not an app that would have surfaced until it was well on its way to becoming what it is today (or was yesterday, I guess).
waterlesscloud 13y ago
Discovery in general is still a pretty knotty problem. Even Netflix, which has a relatively small pool of things to sort through, doesn't do a particularly good job of it. It often recommends things I have no interest in whatsoever, and conversely never recommends things I very much want to watch but have to find manually. It's practical to manually sort as a Netflix customer precisely because their pool is relatively shallow. But I wonder if their weak recommendations are due to that shallow pool, and that in the end there just aren't enough ratings for machine learning algorithms to actually work the way they're supposed to. There's obviously a lot of money in getting recommendations and discovery to actually work, but I wonder if everyone is on a path that's sort of condemned to failure due to lack of enough data. Dunno. Thinking out loud really. I know it's something I'm dissatisfied with pretty much across the board.
- karmelapple 13y ago
  > Even Netflix ... doesn't do a particularly good job of [discovery]. I see this message repeated by a lot of tech people, but I feel like I get fairly good recommendations. Am I alone? What is it about the recommendations that seem bad? Is it because you know there is better content there but the metadata has somehow not categorized it properly for cross-referencing, or does it seem more like it's guessing from a shallow pool and trying to bubble up whatever content it can find, even if it's not a great match? Is there any kind of open source recommendation framework or standard? Couldn't Netflix publish the details of its algorithm, including which metrics it has, to help the community think up more ways to analyze? The value in Netflix right now is in the content, not in the recommendation engine. Looks like the competition Netflix used to host was ended in 2009... would be great if they started it again: http://www.netflixprize.com http://www.netflixprize.com
  - jmduke 13y ago
    I'd argue that Netflix is high-precision, low-recall: the quality of recommendations are usually good, but the recommendations themselves usually don't reflect the entire library.
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    I had a response written to this, but realized I haven't thought it through enough to respond meaningfully. I know I'm dissatisfied. I know it doesn't show me movies I very much want to see, and that it clutters my recommendations with a lot of things I'll never watch. My feeling is that it doesn't capture why I like the movies I like. The categories they've been refining over the years are likely an attempt to address that, but they seem to be missing the important information still. Hmm. PS- re the contest, there was a problem with the anonymized data being de-anonymized by researchers, so they couldn't make it available any more.
  - drabiega 13y ago
    Given my anecdotal experiences of this problem I would guess that Netflix's problem isn't a matter of figuring out what I would like, it's a matter of figuring out what I may not have seen yet. The problem is that the things that I am most likely to like based on my viewings are also the things that I am most likely to have already seen somewhere other than Netflix.
MichaelAO 13y ago
Great point. I've been considering working on a tool that tried to solve this problem for health apps. It would require the user to fill out a form that teases out information about their motivations, health goals, lifestyle, etc.(the more data the better the recommendation). They'd then receive an auto generated menu of apps that'd work specifically well for them. I've spent a lot of time talking to my Dad about healthcare (he's a doctor) and he never recommends mobile apps to his patients for weight loss or anything along those lines. I can't really blame him... there are tens of thousands of health apps. That might change if he had an online tool to send his patients to that did the heavy lifting of making an intelligent recommendation. Here's an interesting study that shows how doctors can be a powerful catalyst in this regard: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(11)61344-5/abstract http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... In the end, it'd just be an app recommendation engine for health. That aside, I 100% agree with what you're saying.

rismay 13y ago

I don't know if I agree with this. I was just talking to my friend about Flappy Bird reviews. When I first got Flappy Bird in early February, the button to rate the game was in the same place where I usually tapped to make the bird fly. Since the "Rate this App" button appeared so quickly after losing the game, I almost rated the app like 5 times in just a couple of minutes. I would like to see the different versions of the app and when this feature / bug was introduced.

rismay 13y ago
I should maybe add his response, "I knoooow, WTF. It's annoying. Why doesn't he just make that button, the "Play Again button?"
dclara 13y ago
Oh, you've caught a point. It's such a smart cheat!
hnguyen 13y ago
He's left handed (https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/431336238985920513 https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/431336238985920513).
- crucialfelix 13y ago
  ^^^ hey look everybody, here he is ! but seriously best of luck to you if it is you. you should remake the game now with a black swan in place of yellow bird.
  - hnguyen 13y ago
    I'm not him. Just happen to be a Vietnamese with the same last name :) "Nguyen" is a common last name in Vietnam, like 40% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen).

blackhole 13y ago

What disturbs me most about this is the complete lack of empathy people have for the guy. Just look at the comments on the link explaining that Flappy Bird was removed from the app store. Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. They hurl insults like "weak" and "fragile" as though someone isn't allowed to be shy ever since the internet happened. The sheer amount of greed on display in debates about this game is deeply unnerving, and it seems as though modern culture has forgotten that there are many things that are more important than money. It seems as though our entire country is hopelessly addicted to accumulating more and more pieces of green paper, only to be puzzled when having a large number in their bank account fails to actually solve any of their problems.

10feet 13y ago
> Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that. It is not obsession with money, it is just confusion over it. I mean, it isn't that hard to ignore all the bad comments and emails, and a small price to pay for riches. There must be something else going on, and that is the bit that is frustrating, not knowing. Of course, it is completely up to him, and this is in no way justification for awful comments or messages to the dev.
- jmduke 13y ago
  it isn't that hard to ignore all the bad comments and emails The gravity and emotional toll of receiving death threats and verbal harassment is often incredibly underestimated by those who haven't received them.
  - baddox 13y ago
    I think the commenter meant to literally ignore comments and emails, as in, don't read them.
- corresation 13y ago

cliveowen 13y ago

I think the main lesson here is that the App Store isn't immune to the bias that plagues most online communities, namely that suddenly popular content benefits from its high position in the system (be that a forum board or section of the App Store) and then it skyrockets as people trust the often naive equation number of users=quality. This either creates successful franchises or an endless stream of one-hit wonders that perpetuates the winner-takes-all mechanism we all have come to know. An ideal system would surface quality content while ensuring equal footing for up-and-comers and wannabe competitors. It looks to me that the answer lies in a complex ranking algorithm that makes heavy use of statistical analysis instead of a set of unproven assumptions and a devil-may-care attitude toward keeping things simple to meet the lowest expectations and nothing more.

raganwald 13y ago
A lot of the dynamics you're describing here on Hacker News also apply to Hacker News. It's the same problem: Surface quality content and don't allow the items on the front page to choke out new submissions just because they're on the front page attracting all the votes.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

arn 13y ago

Bad/Funny Flappy Bird reviews became a meme on its own: http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behind-the-success-of-the-1-app-flappy-bird/ http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behin... So I don't know if it's as simple to suggest it was a pay-for-review scheme, but rather just its own thing. Same thing happened on Amazon milk reviews: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09milk.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09milk.html

objclxt 13y ago
I don't think it's being suggested that a pay-for-review scheme was what caused it to be a hit. The game was available on the store for seven months without getting much traction. The developer probably thought he would try some kind of pay-per-review/promotion service to get a few more downloads. This got the game into the charts, but it only really began to take off because unlike many of its peers using pay-per-review the game actually had a hook that got people playing. In this case the pay-per-review was a tiny catalyst for vast growth. Of course, this assumes the developer used some sort of paid promotion service.
- arn 13y ago
  But he denies that to be the case. And if it was his goal, then why is it pulling it off the app store? Despite how rare it is to have a true grassroots viral hit, I think that's what happened in this case.

corresation 13y ago

Some externals that had a huge influence on Flappy Bird are Vine and then a couple of huge play along YouTubers (such as "pewdiepie"). I made the analogy before that Flappy Bird is the 2 girls 1 cup of games, and while I saved myself from ever seeing that video, it became famous in reaction videos. Exactly the same thing happened with Flappy Bird, first on Vine in early January, and then as the mega-YouTubers picked it up in late January. It was likely pewdiepie who yielded the enormous uptick at the end of January.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
Interesting. So there were a lot of reaction-style vines of people playing Flappy Bird?
- corresation 13y ago
  Absolutely. There are thousands of them. Indeed, the whole "this game is super frustrating" was a meme the author of the game picked up on and leveraged in December. e.g. https://twitter.com/BarlowConnor/statuses/412712696102932480 https://twitter.com/BarlowConnor/statuses/412712696102932480 (Dong is one of the retweeters)
- psyklic 13y ago
  Typically when a product shows up all over Vine like Flappy Bird did, at least some of them were paid for. Any evidence of this?
mcphilip 13y ago
It's worth noting that pewdiepie has 22+ million subscribers. The flappy birds video[1] from January 27th already has 9+ million views. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQz6xhlOt18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQz6xhlOt18
- arn 13y ago
  Ya, but the pew pew video wasn't posted until well after the game hit number 1.

kevando 13y ago

The nerd in me is curious about factors that lead to higher scores. With so many data points, I'd love to see how android vs iphone users scored and if the color of flappy (or "time of day") had any impact on your score. Or how many other people popped a bottle of champagne when they reached level 6...

forrestthewoods 13y ago

I find the endless accusations of a bot network quite tiring. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. Either way there is zero evidence to support such a claim. My favorite part of this whole saga is from the polygon article. Nguyen via Twitter: "Press people are overrating the success of my games. It is something I never want. Please give me peace." Polygon: "We've reached out to Nguyen for comment and will update accordingly." Good job everyone. Good job.

ricardobeat 13y ago
The article presents some (non-conclusive) evidence of a sudden, steady influx of reviews, and more is coming up: https://sensortower.com/flappy-bird-scripted-reviews-analysi.. https://sensortower.com/flappy-bird-scripted-reviews-analysi.... What kind of game developer doesn't want it's creations to succeed?
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  He's explicitly stated in an interview that he didn't do anything to game reviews, so do you stand by what you say, or are you calling him a liar? Not very game developer would resort to nefarious tactics for their own profit. Why does everyone have to look for a cause behind every event - can't you just accept that something might just have ... happened?
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    I'm not taking any conclusions yet. The episode is unusual, accepting that "things just happened" is not my cup of tea. As a developer I'm interested in the dynamics of the app store rankings, if it's still possible for an indie dev to succeed without "help"; and as a former media student, how exactly a little crappy game clone went viral and made it to the top spot in a month. If it turns out it was just a fluke, still more interesting it is.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      It was linked to by a major YouTuber. It is a tiny simple free app. You do one thing, you get one number back. A bit like nananca bike crash. These very simple games are great for the "just one more go" factor, and the bragging rights of "hey! I just beat your top score". Over analysis could lead to incorrect conclusions so I'd be wary of any analysis that explained Flappy Bird without explaining the failure of all the other similar games.

yeukhon 13y ago

I really doubt anyone really got 9999. Not being cynical but what is the odd of so many ppl getting that thigh score?

Nicholas_C 13y ago
If a player can get one point a second that's 2.78 hours of continuous play that would be needed to score 9999.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  But how many try will it take to get pass 9998 and 9997? The precision there. I am sure someone may have that skill to do it, but it's really questionable whether all of them are legitimate or not. And in fact, are they all legitimate... the highest in real life I know is 200.
- gojomo 13y ago
  'Desert Bus' requires 8 hours to score one point... http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-worst-video-game-ever-created.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-w... ...and people play it for days, for charity!
  - Nicholas_C 13y ago
    Wow. That is hilarious. I was going to comment that it should be an Apple/Android app just for shits and giggles but after a cursory search I discovered that it already is! And it costs $1!
idProQuo 13y ago
Hacking scoreboards is pretty easy for people who are skilled at reverse engineering. Once one of these people figures out how to do it (usually by mocking up the high score message the game sends to the server) they release their crack on Cydia, and thousands of people take advantage of it.

Mikeb85 13y ago

I get it. Here you have a developer who just wanted to make games, and maybe a bit of money. He creates a hit, by accident, with a game that has addicting gameplay (and it is, I personally love it). Then everyone in the media calls his game crap and accuses him of cheating the system (without producing any proof). I'd quit too.

MBCook 13y ago
I'm sure he was inundated with people wanting to buy it, license it, claim the made it, asking for tips, etc. I'd imagine this kind of thing basically ruins your email address. Then when he said he didn't like the attention, more hate came. Then when he said he was pulling it, death threats came. Reminds me of people who win the lottery. All their friends just want something, charities start bugging them, they can't be left alone. I feel sorry for him.
- mikeash 13y ago
  I feel sorry for him too, but it seems like it should have been obvious that publicly pulling the game was not the way to make things better. It sucks, but the only way to make it go away is to just ignore it all for a while. The internet will find its new obsession in short order, and Flappy Bird's 15 minutes of fame will be over. Anything he does to try to avoid attention will just make it go on longer.
jordsmi 13y ago
I don't see the point in quitting. I'd rather just not read twitter for a few weeks(can't be that hard) and rake in the cash.
- fhd2 13y ago
  Maybe he doesn't care about money first and foremost? If nothing else, this move demonstrates it. Granted, he probably made about a million by now, which will presumably last quite long where he lives. Still, he could have just kept it online and would probably never have to worry about money again.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I think the most interesting part of this is what the author points out: this is a story about a normal developer riding one hell of a roller-coaster. On top of that, let's face it: the game ain't that much. It's not like there was some special secret sauce he put in there. I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there. So this story, aside from the marketing moves (which I would love to find out about as long as my best 40K other HN friends do not at the same time), is just about winning the lottery. Guy writes app, wins the lottery. This kind of lottery keeps poor schmucks writing apps for walled garden playstores. You get ten thousand people slaving away over little apps, each one hoping to be this guy. He's the guy in the casino who hits on the slots. The casino definitely wants to make sure all the rubes see the pile of money he gets.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
"I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there." I don't know that this is true. Or maybe it's true for "simple and playable", but maybe they're missing the "fun and addictive" qualities that made Flappy Bird work. There's a lot of subtle things that made Flappy Bird a game people enjoyed- the exact responses of the control, the timing and spacing of the obstacles, the quickness of the games, the ease of restarting, and so on. If any of that had been slightly off, it might not have made it. I'm not at all sure he got all that right intentionally, it might well be he just got the balances right through accident. But I do think the precise qualities of the game did matter, and I don't think there's a huge number of games out there that could have done just as well.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  It's a mistake to cast these things in absolutes. Hopefully I didn't do that. Of course, all those things you mention are important. Critical, even. But appstores are not meritocracies, no more than the music industry is. You've got to be working at the top of your game, getting all the details right, and even then 1) you've got a small chance of making it big, and 2) somebody with less skill and execution might do much better than you do. These aren't reasons to give up, just to understand the risks involved. This market exists to extract the maximum amount of developer work for the minimum amount of money. That way the consumers love their little gadgets more -- and will buy even more. It does not exist to make really great developers a decent living. (Although that's certainly possible)

gabemart 13y ago

I think the story of this game exemplifies the fact that content needs a minimum amount of attention to reveal it's true value. The journey of Flappy Bird appears to me like this: Stage 1: Almost no attention, almost no growth Stage 2: Some kind of grey market paid downloads / ratings service Stage 3: Attention of minimum critical mass of early consumers (increase in audience of 1 or perhaps 2 orders of magnitude) Stage 4: Attention of influencers on other platforms, especially pewdiepie on youtube (increase in audience by a couple of orders of magnitude) Stage 5: Attention by large community of enthusiasts (increase in audience by a couple of orders of magnitude) Stage 6: Mass market attention where each stage is dependent on the one before it, with the exception of stage 2, which is performed externally. What's interesting to me is that the qualities the game possesses, which were sufficient to carry it from stage 3 to stage 6 without promotion on the part of the dev, were not sufficient to propel it from stage 1 to stage 3. We could say that the true quality of the game was unknown in stage 1. My personal opinion is that the vast majority of content created languishes in the equivalent of stage 1 for its particular ecosystem. Of this content, the vast majority will be garbage, a small minority will be reasonable and a tiny minority will have the potential to be a widespread hit. But of this last group, most or all of it will never emerge from stage 1 because stage 1 does not provide it with enough attention to separate it from the rest of the (bad) stage 1 content. Increasingly I think that the journey to stage 1 to stage 3 is the most important, most difficult and most overlooked part of the progression. For example, when something is submitted to HN, from my anecdotal observation it will typically get something like 5-10 simultaneous visitors from the new page. If it gets a minimum critical mass of votes to hit the front page, this will increase immediately to something like 50-100 simultaneous viewers and increase from there. But often, it only takes 3-5 upvotes for it to hit the front page. So the relatively trivial actions of the small critical mass of early consumers has an extraordinarily large effect on the dissemination of the content. Indeed, as a content creator, it's often struck me that the actions of those first 3-5 people have an equivalent significance, in terms of the world's experience of my content, to me as the creator. And if you create good content, then just getting to the front page is by far the most difficult part of the process, because once there you will naturally attract upvotes from the vastly increased exposure. But with only a few random bits of cosmic entropy set differently, the creator could create exactly the same content, fail to get those first 3-5 votes, and the number of views on the article/app/etc. could be 10 rather than 10,000 or 100,000. In my experience, lots of platforms follow the same model. Reddit is a very obvious one, but the same holds to for trying to get press interest: so much depends upon the decisions of a few key journalists, and that decision may depend on how many other emails hit their inbox that hour, or whether or not they've had their coffee yet, or some other particle of background entropy. This isn't a criticism of the press, it's just a consequence of the current system. The same is true for people who run influential blogs or social media accounts with large followings, or newsletters. The problem is that there is less attention available per item of content than the minimum quantity of attention needed to rate the quality of that content well. When I create something new, my worry is never "Boy, I hope that people don't simply dislike this," it's always "Boy, I hope that enough people see this to give it a shot of achieving its potential, whatever that turns out to be." If it turns out people don't like it, which is of course always a possibility, that's fairly easy to handle. If it disappears into obscurity, that's much more difficult to accept. When I create content now, my promotion strategy is 99% focused on that first stage. If it reaches that critical mass of attention among a small number of early, influential people, I feel like my job is done and the chips should fall as they may. If it reaches that initial critical mass, people will want to write press stories about it and post it on social media and ask for interviews and tell their friends about it, assuming its any good. This may be an obvious conclusion, but the interesting part, for me, is that the initial critical mass is much smaller, much more random and much more difficult to achieve than most people realize.

jsonmez 13y ago

I would guess there was done kind of foul play and Apple said cut that out, here is a check for x amount of dollars. Just take the app down and let's forget about this.

api 13y ago

This illustrates an important point: Information costs nothing to replicate, but it's attention that is the great scarce commodity of the information age. I expect to see extreme escalation in the sophistication of methods for getting peoples' attention in the coming years.

midhir 13y ago

A few years ago I'd a much more humble experience with virality. I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and make a landing page for people to play with it. Nobody went to it. For months. Like not one person. It's still online today, although I've obviously broken the plugin at some point [1]. Months later my jaw hit the floor when I woke up to an inbox full of emails about this thing. The page had had thousands upon thousands of hits. Not from Belfast, but from NY and SF. It had been featured on a ton of blogs, discussions etc, all in the 6 hours or so I'd been asleep. Traffic had peaked, but it kept coming. A friend we hadn't seen in a while called into our little co-working space to tell me "that thing you put on Hacker News" had been on the front page for hours. I'd never even heard of HN at this point! There was no rhyme nor reason to any of this. The page had been available for months. All I can surmise is that something lit the touchpaper that started a chain reaction. And that I've a lot to learn about how virality works and what makes it function. It makes me wonder did he really engage in some grey market stuff to push Flappy Bird a little. I kind of wonder why he would fork out for something like that when the precedent would indicate he wasn't onto a winner with this game. In retrospect we know he had a great game, the potential for serious chain-reaction style virality was there, maybe the spark that lit the touch-paper was something innocuous that no-one would ever guess? [1]: http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/ http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/

jbeja 13y ago

To be honest like realy honest, i couldn't careless. The guy was making more money than me and given my current situation, i can't feel not even the most tiny drop of empathy for him. Don't even like the game.

kimonos 13y ago

I love Flappy Bird. Period.

liamsalcido 13y ago

I feel that instead of taking the game down he could use the money that he was getting from the game and give it to charity. That way he could still live the simple life that he wanted while doing something positive as well.

stasy 13y ago

But the question is, what did he do in December that jump started his downloads? Or, if he didn't do anything, what happened that started the rise in downloads/reviews?

JabavuAdams 13y ago

I think people are unwilling to accept luck as an explanation. This might especially be true for the HN audience, because so many of us work so hard hoping to have a success like this.

fhd2 13y ago
Well, at least in the (indie) gaming industry, it seems to be generally admitted. It's called "app store lottery" for a reason. And there's certainly not much survivorship bias going on.

rexreed 13y ago

In the linked article, the writer claims that by using AdMob, he left $1M on the table... I'm curious - where does this claim come from? The fact that he could have sold the app? Or is there a different untapped revenue stream?

wnevets 13y ago

Im convinced more people talk about this game than actually play it.

ja27 13y ago

So removing the app from the store doesn't turn off the ad revenue unless he kills his ad account. Removing it could be kind of a shrewd way to boost downloads one last time before people move on.

fhd2 13y ago
Even then, I'm pretty sure his revenues from this will be insignificant in a short time. This certainly seems like it lives from new users trying it and accidentally touching ads. The few power users that will still be around one day after it's taken off the stores probably won't matter revenue-wise. And I can imagine that he'd lose all his money if he killed the account.

mromanuk 13y ago

Obviously, this is the ultimate conclusion: 1. Make Flappy Bird 2. 3. Profits

fhd2 13y ago

I don't hate the guy, but what does get me is that some unethical paid download service and a whole lot of luck seemed to be the deciding factors for success, certainly not the game's quality. I wonder if it's gonna get better or worse in the near term. Pretty discouraging if you make games.

overgard 13y ago

Flappy Bird is pretty much the definition of a black swan. I hope people don't take too much away from it other than: huh, that's weird.

frou_dh 13y ago

Flappy Bird's the first app with onscreen banner advertising I've happened upon for years and my god it's disgusting to have these crappy looking ads constantly sliding onto the top of the screen. I sincerely hope paid or otherwise bankrolled apps continue to be prevalent.

josephlord 13y ago

The most important number about Flappy Bird is 4. From dying you can be back flying again in less than 4 seconds and be back at the first obstacle in less than 8 seconds. There are many games that should learn from that.

1337biz 13y ago

The most interesting question to me is what is you guys' experience with seeding app store reviews? It seems that it definitely worked in that case (any many maybe more we don't know about). Are there some white hat review services, with people that actually download the app? Or is it all just black bot spammer'y?

FollowSteph3 13y ago

What was his marketing experiment?

j_m_b 13y ago

If "getting famous" is such a devastating thing for an app developer, quit making games for popular devices. There is plenty of scientific computing projects that are far more interesting and have tiny audiences... lack of fame surely awaits you!

lmm 13y ago
In fairness the whole app feels like someone experimenting with building something simple for the iOS platform rather than trying to make a mega-successful game.

cognivore 13y ago

This is a good example of the "Lemming Economy" that mobile phones have created, and which I cannot heap on enough derision. The Lemming Economy follows a model where dozens upon dozens up near pointless applications are created in an attempt find just something that will get enough momentum to drive an ever increasing number of lemmings over the cliff (purchase). Upon succeeding more lemmings scramble to create copy-cats of the game to cash in on the stampede. There's no point except to try and generate cash out of they prevailing whims of the lemmings. This model neither creates a viable business model (because you can't rely on quality equaling sales) nor useful software (because that doesn't drive the lemmings over the cliff). Maybe Flappy Birds isn't horrible, I don't know. But the developer obviously didn't like getting caught in the stampede and all of a sudden getting exposed to the general population. I would have taken down the app, too.

quasarj 13y ago

Interesting article.. but I'd be careful about scraping anything from iTunes. This could easily be classified as wire fraud in the US (and there is already precedent with someone being convicted).