Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

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"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 roguelikes."

Some people do want those things, which is why these genres have dedicated followings.

At the risk of sounding glib: Flappy Bird's success doesn't prove or disprove anything about the gaming industry. It certainly isn't some sort of paradigm shift, and it's hardly an indication that "no one knows what the audience wants."

To put it more directly: there is no "the audience," in some monolithic and homogenous sense of the word. There are audiences. When an outlier comes around every now and then, offering novel gameplay and a unique sensibility, that's awesome. But it doesn't mean everyone else is somehow wrong. The only ones who will get it wrong, in this case, will be the legions of publishers rushing Flappy Bird clones to market in the hopes of catching some of its halo effect. (Upon last app store search, it seemed there are already many dozens of these in the market.)

I also think, with indie games, you get things like "heart" and "unique visual sensibility" simply because those are the most easily available ways for an indie developer to add value to their game.

And similarly with Zynga/facebook games- I don't think it's necessarily their opinion that they are making the "right" game, it's just that they are making the game most likely to draw in people from social networks and keep them.

I don't disagree with most of your post, but I still think the basic message of the blog post is valid.

Obviously, if developers in AAA or indie sector knew that this kind of huge success could be had with a game like this, they would have made it. But it's humbling to consider that no matter how long people make games, nobody knows the formula for the making next big hit. I don't think he's trying to say that AAA or indie developers are dumb.

AAA developers aren't trying to make games that earn $50K/day (while a game is getting 1MM+ installs per day). AAA developers can spend $100MM+ in development costs and are looking for titles that can make $200K/day or launch and make $75MM on day 1.

Indie developers would love to make this type of game, but the fact is that even with the monumental success the game has had from a download perspective (50MM downloads), it's still only making $50K/day. That's like winning the lottery. Most indie devs are going to make games that get downloaded fewer than 1 million times, which, for a title like this, isn't going to make more than 1-2 employee salaries (let alone the up-front cost of building the game for the first X months for free).

That's all true, but I still think that if anyone (indie, AAA, or otherwise) knew they could have the no 1 spot in the app store simply by making Flapper (a relatively small investment to develop), they would have done it. Even if the game is free, the publicity alone is worth a huge amount.

But nobody knew.

I feel like you're saying if indie, AAA knew the lottery numbers for next week they would have bought a ticket. Which of course they would have. But I don't see this game as something that is repeatable. It seems literally like winning the lottery, whether or not you can get a simple game in the app store to be such a success.

So I don't see the value in saying that nobody knew. In the same way saying someone didn't know next weeks lottery numbers doesn't make them incompetent or the person who won the lottery a genius (or have some special insight).

I didn't call the other game developers incompetent and I don't think the Flapper developer is a genius.

I'm just saying that art is pretty mysterious and despite the fact that people have been making video games for quite a while now, no one knows the formula for the next big hit and somehow the next hit always finds new and old ways to surprise us. But just my $0.02 ^_^

We know a lot of very effective formulas. Thats not to say all profit comes from games that follow formulas, but the formulas certainly make it more likely.

Exactly. Just the same way that every music label would make "Gangnam Style" and "Friday".

There's a huge difference between AAA developers and indie developers. To say that a AAA dev would make games like Flappy Bird if they knew it would work is like saying a teacher would have chosen a career in underwater welding if he knew how lucrative underwater welding is.

It's a fair point, and I don't mean to come across as overly dismissive of the article in general.

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.

Yup. In my previous job I wrote a UI framework for set top box developers in my company to be able to be able to create interfaces relatively easily. One of the exercises I used to give them during training was to write exactly this game (well, except artwork). It's ideal for a platform that has an RC remote control as its interface... So it's far from an original idea, you have to just assume that the developer got lucky.

i think you're point is a bit off-the-mark, so i'm going to add a qualifier to the title to put you in the right direction.

"Flappy Bird is proof that no one knows what the audience wants..."

...in order to fully maximize revenue per employee.

Exactly - There is no universal truth involving pretty much anything/

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