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Dang 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.
I don't know how this game became so popular. Did Justin Bieber tweet about it?
I 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...
Also it's a total Black Swan event and should be treated as such.
Otherwise, you suck and we hate you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And to be clear, if I had made your original comment earnestly, and received the GPs reply, I am not at all certain that I wouldn't take it just the way you did. I'm just pointing out that it needn't be taken that way.
This 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. O…
The point of the story is not that people want Flappy Bird -- it's that despite numerous predictions and formulas used in the industry to determine which projects get funded, nobody was talking about doing a game like Flappy Bird. Prior to its success, it would have been dismissed out of hand to spend resources on a title like that. The author is making the point that predicting what people want is not formulaic, it appears to be quite random.
Just replace the gaming genres mentioned with musical ones and Flappy Bird with "Macarena" or "Who Let the Dogs Out?". It doesn't really need 1000 words.
Flappy Bird is sort of notable because it's probably the simplest "hit" game we've seen in recent memory. It's the sort of thing that appeals to people who aren't even casual gamers, people who wouldn't engage with something like the original Plants vs. Zombies.
Other than that, it has some winning elements: it's difficult but not impossible. You can play it for 30 seconds or 30 minutes. It is simple. It has a goal you can endlessly pursue. It tickles the nostalgia of all those who grew up on games that this game "borrows" the visuals from.
I 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.
The success spawned hundreds of imitations, and in about a year the craze had died.
The only surprising things here are, in my mind: A) that the full cycle has gone so quickly, and B) that the author of the article doesn't remember (or acknowledge) a fairly recent past.
If I remember correctly, the last time single-action games were hot topic was about three years ago. Back then it was the black-and-white iOS game, with character running through the city roofs, and your only control was a tap to jump. No idea what it was called. The success spawned hundreds of imitations, and in about a year the craze had died. The only surprising things here are, in my mind: A) that the full cycle…