
Why Do Fads Fade? The Inevitable Death Of Flappy Bird - mkarthik
https://blog.startuppulse.net/why-do-fads-fade-the-inevitable-death-of-flappy-bird-1bbda20478e0
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tw1010
What a weird article. It feels like the author wanted to convey his insight
that the reason fads fade is due to the gameplay having a constrained
information density. And then he felt the urge to follow the tradition of
anchoring the thesis in a concrete current example, and he chose flappy birds.
But flappy birds is not at all an example that satisfies the hypothesis.
Flappy bird, as he mentions, was deliberately pulled from the store by its
creator. Why didn't he choose pokemon go instead? Because that hasn't fully
faded yet? I'm not trying to personally attack the author, I'm just making a
comment that the style in this article probably isn't what we want to emulate
in our own stuff.

~~~
golergka
> But flappy flappy birds is not at all an example that satisfies the
> hypothesis. Flappy bird, as he mentions, was deliberately pulled from the
> store by its creator.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of clones out there, and people who wanted to
play it were and are free to play any of them. So, we can safely gauge if the
fad is really gone by popularity of the whole genre it created, not
necessarily by the original itself.

~~~
watwut
That is not entirely true. Most of those clones are not fun at all despite
having the same concept. Or they are fun, but not nearly as addictive for some
reason. Details of execution matter and original flappy bird somehow got a lot
of details right. Randomly downloaded app does not.

It is same as with pc-man and tetris. Most of clones are not fun at all,
despite having the same concept.

Source: I played both original flappy and then tried some of clones.

~~~
cr0sh
There's a claim (according to wikipedia and other sources) that Flappy Bird
was a clone of another game (called "Piou Piou vs Cactus"). I'm not going to
argue "which came first", but your comment is intriguing:

1\. If Flappy Bird was a clone, what made it more "addictive" or "fun to play"
than the original (Piou Piou)?

2\. What did clones of Flappy Bird do wrong?

3\. How does Flappy Bird's "addictive mechanics" compare/relate to other games
that hook players?

4\. What about similar schemes/products (non-virtual)?

I mean - what do all these hook into; why and how do they become ultra-popular
(seriously - $50K per day for Flappy Bird!), etc?

I and some former coworkers called these types of products (League of Legends
could certainly fit in here) "Money Fountains" \- relatively simple mechanics
(in some cases executed extremely well - I mean, to my eye, LoL is a beautiful
and engaging game, despite the basic concepts) that generate for their
developers insane amounts of cash, seemingly without end.

All legally.

But at the same time, others trying to follow in the footsteps of the
"pioneers" seem to fail more than they succeed. So the question is, why and
how to the originals succeed? Is it just luck? First mover advantage? Or is it
something else?

~~~
LV-426
> There's a claim (according to wikipedia and other sources) that Flappy Bird
> was a clone of another game (called "Piou Piou vs Cactus").

Haven't read the Wiki page, or heard of Piou Piou, but I always thought FB was
a rip off of Copter, a game for Nokia style phones where you pressed 5 (IIRC)
to keep it airborne.

Maybe "original" Flappy was great and I just played crappy Flappy clones, but
dying literally within seconds over and over again didn't make me want to
continue, I was just instantly bored, stopped playing and forgot it. I don't
understand the craze for such a horrible game.

Copter was good though.

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indescions_2017
Indie GameDev is absolutely a hits driven business. Often I tell people you
will learn more from studying some thing like the Autobiography of Keith
Richards. Than yet another build a game engine in thirty days book ;)

Html5 "io" games follow similar viral trajectories. But also have some staying
power. Once they develop mechanics or features that encourage replay-ablity.
Particularly at web scale multiplayer with leaderboards ;)

Some examples for Friday Fun

[http://splix.io/](http://splix.io/)

[https://starblast.io/](https://starblast.io/)

[http://zombs.io/](http://zombs.io/)

~~~
metalrain
One more [http://agar.io/](http://agar.io/) This one seems to have quite long
legs, but no idea how profitable it is.

~~~
DiThi
That's the game that made the genre that people call "io games"

~~~
jameskegel
I don't like this trend, that would be like me calling all SNES games "SUPER
Games" because most of them were prepended with the word "SUPER", but it's not
a descriptor of the genre, just the nomenclature.

~~~
Kiro
Do you have a better name?

~~~
jameskegel
How about "Browser-based"?

~~~
Kiro
No, besides browser-based it needs to be massively multiplayer, casual,
without rounds (games are endless and you can jump right into an ongoing one)
and without registration for it to qualify as an io game.

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natecavanaugh
This one kind of lost me on it's comparison to Breaking Bad. I could be an
outlier here, but I've rewatched Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The
Walking Dead at least 4 times, probably more.

The reason I don't think I'm too much of an outlier, in that AMC always runs a
marathon to both attract new viewers and reconnect existing viewers, and if it
weren't successful, I doubt they'd keep doing it.

The article makes some good points about variability and using the story line
format to get people hooked, but it's examples and connections seem really
tenuous to the overall point.

~~~
ghaff
Given that all the production costs are sunk at this point, the incremental
cost of offering as part of a streaming catalog or filling up some AMC
broadcast slots as part of an "event" is pretty low.

Pre-streaming, I'm sure a lot more people bought DVD sets of favorite series
than actually rewatched them from beginning to end. The same principle applies
today I'm sure even in the cases where the content is effectively free.

I'm not sure this example really counts as a fad though. While successive
groups rediscover older TV shows (not that the ones you list are very old at
all) viewership is rarely going to be more than of a fraction than it was
originally. Perhaps there are marginal exceptions for shows that never really
had an audience but develop a bit of a cult following over time.

ADDED: The other issue I have with the author's broader theory is that much of
what he says is just as applicable to episodic TV shows like Seinfeld as it is
to serialized shows.

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throwaway2016a
I would love to create an app that makes $50k a day and lasted even a week. I
wouldn't care if it was a fad at that point.

~~~
elboru
Imaging making that amount of money for a programmer in a developing country
(in this case Vietnam), it would be insane, making $20k a year as a developer
in my country is considered a well payed job. If you could make $350k in a
week that would mean 17.5 years of a "well payed" programming job.

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xchaotic
Interesting timing as a French clone of Flappy Bird - VooDoo (with a ball
instead of bird) is currently the top game in Google Play store...

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vinchuco
TLDR; conflict,mystery,resolution : are three phases in a cycle to keep you
engaged

(akin to the way this article was written)

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tantalor
Author is blissfully unaware that _Flappy Bird_ is alive and well in arcades:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIZvK5yORrw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIZvK5yORrw)

(video from 2015 but I played one last week)

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jrs95
Didn’t Flappy Bird die because it was pulled from app stores?

~~~
rando444
The author decided he preferred peace and quiet over leaving flappy bird in
the app store.

[http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-flappy-birds-shut-
down-201...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-flappy-birds-shut-down-2014-2)

~~~
SyneRyder
Dong Nguyen kept making games, though. His company is called .GEARS, and the
successor is Swing Copters:

[http://www.dotgears.com/](http://www.dotgears.com/)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=DOTGEARS](https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=DOTGEARS)

He also made Ninja Spinki Challenges, which I really enjoyed for a while and
has some really cute graphics:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotgears.n...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotgears.ninjabounce)

~~~
randlet
> Swing Copters

This appears to just be Flappy Bird rotated 90deg [1]. Pretty funny!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuoCeze0B3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuoCeze0B3c)

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erikb
I don't think there is much reason analysing lucky successes. Real success
happens by getting a little lucky here and a little lucky there, learning over
time how to keep the good fortune once acquired, and then stacking one success
over another. Analysing FarmVille and Flappy Bird is like analysing why a
lottery winner chose the right numbers.

And in both cases the surprise money is gone just as quickly.

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hasbot
Anybody here remember the pet rock fad of the 70's? The more interesting
question to me regarding silly fads like pet rocks, droopy pants, and "Baby On
Board" stickers is how they begin.

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DoodleBuggy
Because that's what fads do. They're transient by nature, that's why they're
called a fad.

