
As ‘Slither.io’ Goes Viral, Game’s Creator Scrambles to Keep Up - personjerry
http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-slither-io-goes-viral-games-creator-scrambles-to-keep-up-1466195058
======
mabbo
It'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.

~~~
TTPrograms
It 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
lag/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)

------
boulos
I'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
>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
Wrong. 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
The "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?

------
urza
I would like to read something like this [https://hookrace.net/blog/ddnet-
evolution-architecture-techn...](https://hookrace.net/blog/ddnet-evolution-
architecture-technology/)

from slither.io creator(s)

About their infrastructure, sw, hw architecture.. revenue model.. etc.. could
be very interesting read

------
arca_vorago
"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
I 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
I 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.

------
gortok
WSJ reading tip: if you type the title into Google, you can click that link
and read the WSJ article for free.

~~~
maxerickson
There's a link to that search on each HN discussion page, it's the "web" link
under the story link.

~~~
personjerry
Wow, I've never noticed that. That should be highlighted or something.
Actually maybe there should be a tutorial to HN.

~~~
curiousgal
I 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.

------
curiousgal
It's basically Tron meets Agar.io

~~~
syngrog66
this 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.

------
blatant
Warning: Pay-walled a article.

~~~
breadtk
Mirror: [https://archive.is/RiGJD](https://archive.is/RiGJD)

------
mavhc
I 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

------
Xeiliex
If 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
So it's still a major accomplishment? And he's even more cunning by doing it
purposefully?

~~~
lawpoop
I don't think OP is saying it's not an accomplishment, just not that it was a
viral accomplishment.

------
ascendantlogic
At the risk of sounding naive, nothing jumped out at me as to how he's making
revenue. What am I missing?

~~~
irongloves
Every 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)

------
Swennemans
I expected to be a Firebase based app. Seems like a good match.

------
srtjstjsj
This is a submarine ad, not a real story about scaling.

------
urza
Could someone paste the text somewhere please?

~~~
curiousgal
[http://i.imgur.com/Kfg1spC.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Kfg1spC.jpg)

