> people want games that are bone-crushingly difficult, but not punishing Yes, VVVVVV taught me that.
Super hexagon is pretty much the only game I play on my phone. Terry Cavanaugh is an evil genius.
Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
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Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#122There are 100s of flash games that are the same as what this game looks to be (but with various different kinds of characters like a helicopter, a flying dude, ...). How can this game be noteworthy?
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#123"The big players in the AAA sector believe the people want military shooters and open-world games full of the old ultra violence." A lot of people do want those things, which is why "Call of Duty" and "Grand Theft Auto" make billions of dollars every sequel. "The indie community believes that what people really want is experimental games with heart and a unique visual sensibility. And puzzle platformers. And roguelik…
Flappy bird is already a clone itself so they were there even before. And there are also similar games that are really polished and beautiful (like Badland with its great story and graphics). Flappy bird is a fluke (regarding popularity), I think. Being free definitely helped them too.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#124This 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…
It turns out that what the people really want, for the moment at least, is Flappy Bird. 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 tha…
I'm not sure what you mean by nobody talking about doing a game like Flappy Bird. Of course, no one was talking about a game exactly like it - every game is different.
But there's loads of games quite a lot like it already - it's basically a very simple version of something like Jetpack Joyride with a subtly different input mechanism (repeated tap instead of holding down to fly). That's a game so common that there's even a tutorial (http://www.raywenderlich.com/9050/how-to-make-a-game-like-je...) on how to write your own version. There's a fair chance that the author of Flappy Bird used this as the source for the game.
I've no idea what actually made Flappy Bird successful, but whatever it was it's certainly not any huge gameplay innovation that others had failed to spot.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#125> people want games that are bone-crushingly difficult, but not punishing Yes, VVVVVV taught me that.
Super hexagon is pretty much the only game I play on my phone. Terry Cavanaugh is an evil genius.
Super hexagon is crushingly difficult, it's the one game I can keep returning to over and over on my commute.
Flappy bird also hits a similar spot, it's a game that's quick, each game lasts < 1 minute so you can play right up to the minute your train pulls into the station, and it has the anticipation of defeat in a similar manner.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#126I 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...
yea, you are right. Flappy Bird is exactly the same. I was addicted to the Copter game, prolly around 2007..
https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/copter-game/id433399893?mt=8
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#127I 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...
There are roughly eleventy kazillion mobile clones of that helicopter game. However, Flappy Bird is the first one I've seen that has a constant difficulty. Most things start easy, get increasingly hard, and arguably at some point become impossible. High scores become primarily a function of the RNG at the skill ceiling. In Flappy Bird if you die it's 100% your fault all the time which makes it quite compelling to try…
Not exactly a black swan (because afterwards you know of black swans and can anticipated them) but more a lottery ticket. There is no recipe or logic behind why Flappy Bird got immensely popular, just sheer luck.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#128There are 100s of flash games that are the same as what this game looks to be (but with various different kinds of characters like a helicopter, a flying dude, ...). How can this game be noteworthy?
It's noteworthy because this one became popular. That's how the world works.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently it was already #1 on the App Store before that, though. Pewdiepie's video was 10 days afterwards: http://tabtimes.com/feature/tablet-game-business/2014/02/04/... It's bizarre that the game has been out since May 2013, didn't do very well, and then suddenly went viral 8 months later. It'd be fascinating to see what exactly kicked it off.
Malcolm Gladwell would love to get his grubby little hands on that fact!
Then beat the crap out of the poor fact until not even its own mother could recognise it and prove that aliens once walked on Mars because, like, there's a carrot in New York and Flappy Bird and THEREFORE TRUE.
Several quintillion dollars later from the sales of his book "I think you'll find the plural of anecdote is actually my 12 figure bank account", he retires.
Re: Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants
#130There are 100s of flash games that are the same as what this game looks to be (but with various different kinds of characters like a helicopter, a flying dude, ...). How can this game be noteworthy?
That's exactly the point (of the article - although it may in some weird sense also be the point of the game)