People themselves don't know what they want, how can developers know.
Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
21–30 of 149 posts
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#22This story is incredibly reductionist to the point of being false.
Flappy Bird tells you nothing about what the 'People' want. Today they want a single button physics game, tomorrow they want hardcore shooters. Some people want RPGs, others want micropayment sandboxes.
They problem is that everyone is trying to copy the dumb luck of developers who happen upon the right mix of categories at the right moment in time. Once flappy bird is copied 100x times and becomes an expected mechanic it will no longer be what the people want.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#23Everyone knows what the audience wants from a game: fun.
It's not easy to define fun nor to quantify and it plus it is extremely fragile in the face of money people and managers. Fun takes design, accidents and a lot of iteration.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#24I haven't played Flappy Bird, but it seems really similar to a helicopter game that was inordinately popular in my middle school 10-12 years ago. It looks like it's still up. http://www.addictinggames.com/action-games/helicoptergame.js...
I might be wrong on this one, but as far as I remember, the originator of this type of game is "The Infamous Worm Game": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OjeFYNq05k
Sadly, the original site that hosted it just has a "Java Applet" placeholder there now: http://www.liquidcode.org/worm.html
It had a very good balance between difficulty and frustration. Or in other words, I wasted a lot of time on it.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#25I think it's pretty much impossible to predict what little games like this will go viral. Flappy Bird definitely has all the ingredients, but so do so many other games that never exploded this big. I wonder if anybody has made a business out of "investing" in the development of a large number of such games (a single developer could probably make a game a week), in the hope that just one of them goes viral.
Regardless, I think there's an untapped market of people who want decent mobile games that don't have predatory schemes for monetization.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#26My kids had this game on their ipad. They asked me to have a go at it, I had a look, started playing... 30 minutes later "Dad can I have my my ipad back". Seriously I was hating that game, but the desire to beat my kids score outweighed my frustration at some of those issues (hitbox of the pipes etc). I HAD to beat my previous score, I HAD to master the delicate touch required to precisely navigate those pipes. It's not even a new mechanic. It's the same as Jet Pack Joyride, so it's a copy of existing games, and it completely flogged Mario world graphics, possibly stole them as is and the guy might even have to answer to Nintendo.
It isn't on my list of games I've loved, but it was fun, in a completely infuriating way.
It's better than other games my kids typically play, ice-cream manufacturing/construction type games
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#27First, they want games about birds. What kind of conclusion is this? It's a 2-d side-scrolling game with basic sinking/gravity dynamics. There are only a few ways to make a game with those rules. (1) use a flying object/animal (2) put the level underwater (eg Super Mario Brothers, 1985) (3) make the game entirely abstract.
I think he was joking.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#28Dang it, me and buddy made a same very similar to this about 1-1,5 back for programming class and one of our peers told us multiple times to port it over to mobile, but we didn't believe that anyone wanted to play such a game.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#29I have been wondering if the developer has made much money from the app at all really. In spite of the overwhelmingly vast number of downloads, the adverts only show whilst you are playing the game. Aside from the momentary lag when they appear, most users probably don't even notice them because they are concentrating so hard. Users are almost guaranteed to pay the adverts no attention lest they risk the possibility…
Apparently they make $50k a day in ad revenue ( http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5383708/flappy-bird-revenue... ). Seems like that would be 'much money'.
Good for them, it is always nice to see indie developers succeed. I didn't mean to come across negatively, if that's what your disparaging quote was inferring.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#30I haven't played Flappy Bird, but it seems really similar to a helicopter game that was inordinately popular in my middle school 10-12 years ago. It looks like it's still up. http://www.addictinggames.com/action-games/helicoptergame.js...
This reminds me of a couple of games I had on the Commodore-64. One had a helicopter, but the other was Lunar Lander, which has a very similar mechanic.
I can recall a few others with similar play style - Star paws and Zaxxon come to mind.