
Flappy Bird by the Numbers - zachwill
http://zachwill.com/flappy-bird/
======
blackhole
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.

~~~
jamesaguilar
I would say, given what money can do for you in this world -- how much easier
it can make your life, the doors it can open -- that it is at the very least
_surprising_ that anyone would turn down this kind of success. In fact, I'll
bet you'd have trouble finding one person out of a hundred who would not be
willing to suffer pretty significant pain for two weeks if it meant they'd
make $50,000 a day. Given that people are willing to do this, they're shocked
that this dev wouldn't just turn off his twitter, shut down his phone, book a
trip to the beach and just ride it out there.

There may be a small handful of people in the world for whom taking the app
down is the long-term rational decision. But I'd wager they are a fairly rare
breed.

~~~
ricardobeat
The possible subtext is that he is shutting it down in fear of bad
repercussion - like being exposed for gaming the app store rankings - or to
simply avoid such accusations.

~~~
uptown
That's my guess. For all, for the sake of argument, let's say this developer
did hire somebody to pump up his numbers. They could even be extorting him to
pay them more in exchange for their silence. It reminds me of the movie
'Office Space' ... where they rig their software to shave fractional-pennies
off of each transaction for an eventual payday, only to have their plan work
too well too quickly.

~~~
brador
Could be covering his ass on a cease and desist, making it seem like his
decision.

Most people who get one don't know if they can talk about it publicly or not
and just want it to go away.

------
antics
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
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.

~~~
antics
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).

------
forrestthewoods
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
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
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
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
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.

------
midhir
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/)

------
DanielBMarkham
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
"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
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)

------
Mikeb85
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
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
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.

------
rismay
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.

~~~
hnguyen
He's left handed
([https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/431336238985920513](https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/431336238985920513)).

~~~
crucialfelix
^^^ 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
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)).

------
arn
Bad/Funny Flappy Bird reviews became a meme on its own:
[http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-
behin...](http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behind-the-
success-of-the-1-app-flappy-bird/)

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
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
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.

------
gabemart
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.

~~~
gbog
You should add the simpler, deeper issue of upvoting mechanically filtering
out good long form content.

Say I found a link here and it's a really good long form story, I really got
into it, even had a coffee break while reading it. Then I want to vote for it,
but the link has fallen down and is hard to find back.

It is even worse on Google, Facebook or Twitter, because of the infinite
scrolling. I always open seemingly interesting links in the background and
continue scrolling, but then hardly ever even try to like, plus one or
favorite good content.

It's like a perverse filter, selecting cat pics and crash gifs over really
nice content that require more than a few seconds to digest.

The one who will fix this will actually revolutionize content selection and
probably kill curation.

~~~
jzwinck
One simple change would be to replace time-based "gravity" dragging items down
as they age. Instead, gravity could be based on the number of users who have
"finished" consuming the content. Perhaps by just clicking "Back" to the
aggregator, or by explicitly acknowledging the completion. There could be
three buttons: Like, Dislike, and Saw But Don't Care. In the algorithm to
drive items downward, time would be replaced by the count of all three
actions. Long-form content would then not be penalized so much (but would
still be disadvantaged by users who dislike or don't care about long-form
content, of course).

A New page might also need to be sorted differently, e.g. by putting items
with zero count at the top, and ignoring time as with the front page.

------
api
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.

------
JabavuAdams
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
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.

------
cognivore
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.

------
cliveowen
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
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.

------
j_m_b
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
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.

------
ja27
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
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.

------
overgard
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.

------
kevando
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...

------
1337biz
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?

------
fhd2
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.

------
frou_dh
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.

------
rexreed
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?

------
liamsalcido
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.

------
josephlord
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.

------
quasarj
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).

------
stasy
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?

------
yeukhon
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
If a player can get one point a second that's 2.78 hours of continuous play
that would be needed to score 9999.

~~~
gojomo
'Desert Bus' requires 8 hours to score one point...

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-w...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-
worst-video-game-ever-created.html)

...and people play it for days, for charity!

~~~
Nicholas_C
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!

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

------
mromanuk
Obviously, this is the ultimate conclusion:

1\. Make Flappy Bird 2\. 3\. Profits

------
FollowSteph3
What was his marketing experiment?

------
corresation
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
Interesting. So there were a lot of reaction-style vines of people playing
Flappy Bird?

~~~
psyklic
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?

------
kimonos
I love Flappy Bird. Period.

------
jbeja
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.

------
jsonmez
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.

