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.
Flappy Bird by the Numbers
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Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#12The 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...
Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#13What'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…
Discovery in general is still a pretty knotty problem.
Even Netflix, which has a relatively small pool of things to sort through, doesn't do a particularly good job of it. It often recommends things I have no interest in whatsoever, and conversely never recommends things I very much want to watch but have to find manually.
It's practical to manually sort as a Netflix customer precisely because their pool is relatively shallow. But I wonder if their weak recommendations are due to that shallow pool, and that in the end there just aren't enough ratings for machine learning algorithms to actually work the way they're supposed to.
There's obviously a lot of money in getting recommendations and discovery to actually work, but I wonder if everyone is on a path that's sort of condemned to failure due to lack of enough data.
Dunno. Thinking out loud really. I know it's something I'm dissatisfied with pretty much across the board.
Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#14Bad/Funny Flappy Bird reviews became a meme on its own: http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behin... 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
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.
Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#15What 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"…
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.
Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#16I 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.
Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#17I 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…
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.
Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#18I 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…
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.
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Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#19What 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"…
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 a…
Average monthly salary for a software developer in Vietnam is, what, $600/mo? Nguyen was making around seven years' salary per day for two weeks. A lot of the doors that could be opened with money were already opened at that point.
Re: Flappy Bird by the Numbers
#20I really doubt anyone really got 9999. Not being cynical but what is the odd of so many ppl getting that thigh score?