Nothing has demonstrated that it's referrals by friends -- it saw a small amount of attention on HN, and from that the inevitable reposts on Reddit. Further if

Nothing has demonstrated that it's referrals by friends -- it saw a small amount of attention on HN, and from that the inevitable reposts on Reddit. Further if the definition were so limited, then we could say that everything has "gone viral", making the phrase meaningless -- instead there is some level of scale necessary, which I don't think this level of success meets. HN is a finicky, short-attention span beast, by design. A front page of HN, and tens of thousands of uniques, often yields zero residual "value" (seriously, zero. The most lauded piece on here with endless upvotes and you're lucky if a single reader reposts it anywhere else or mentions it, beyond the karma seekers who stick it on /r/programming). I don't get this post. 6000 unique visitors in no universe yields thousands of emails (again, due to the short attention span probably 5000 clicked back ten seconds in), unless the game itself generates enormous amounts of operator notifications and mechanical turk type behavior, in which case the game is unsustainable for anyone. The model of getting a project to some level of success and then offloading it is an entirely reasonable one (though really the tough luck story I think undermines the pitch), though at the current level of success this project is, sadly, currently close to worthless. Having a very temporary spike of a niche user base is not at all sustainable.