Flappy Bird by the Numbers

What 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" as though someone isn't allowed to be shy ever since the internet happened. The sheer amount of greed on display in debates about this game is deeply unnerving, and it seems as though modern culture has forgotten that there are many things that are more important than money. It seems as though our entire country is hopelessly addicted to accumulating more and more pieces of green paper, only to be puzzled when having a large number in their bank account fails to actually solve any of their problems.

What'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's like Yahoo! was in 1994.

Considering that Flappy Bird was made popular by power users on other platforms (particularly YouTube), I think that this point is really important: the app store is probably not the best platform to surface new apps.

A good exercise for entrepreneurs is to think of a better model. If anything, the success of Flappy Bird is one hell of an incentive to find out.

(Also: if you have ideas about this, like me, we should have a chat.)

I 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.

A few years ago I'd a much more humble experience with virality.

I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and make a landing page for people to play with it.

Nobody went to it. For months. Like not one person. It's still online today, although I've obviously broken the plugin at some point [1].

Months later my jaw hit the floor when I woke up to an inbox full of emails about this thing. The page had had thousands upon thousands of hits. Not from Belfast, but from NY and SF. It had been featured on a ton of blogs, discussions etc, all in the 6 hours or so I'd been asleep. Traffic had peaked, but it kept coming.

A friend we hadn't seen in a while called into our little co-working space to tell me "that thing you put on Hacker News" had been on the front page for hours. I'd never even heard of HN at this point!

There was no rhyme nor reason to any of this. The page had been available for months. All I can surmise is that something lit the touchpaper that started a chain reaction. And that I've a lot to learn about how virality works and what makes it function.

It makes me wonder did he really engage in some grey market stuff to push Flappy Bird a little. I kind of wonder why he would fork out for something like that when the precedent would indicate he wasn't onto a winner with this game.

In retrospect we know he had a great game, the potential for serious chain-reaction style virality was there, maybe the spark that lit the touch-paper was something innocuous that no-one would ever guess?

[1]: http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/

I think the most interesting part of this is what the author points out: this is a story about a normal developer riding one hell of a roller-coaster.

On top of that, let's face it: the game ain't that much. It's not like there was some special secret sauce he put in there. I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there.

So this story, aside from the marketing moves (which I would love to find out about as long as my best 40K other HN friends do not at the same time), is just about winning the lottery. Guy writes app, wins the lottery.

This kind of lottery keeps poor schmucks writing apps for walled garden playstores. You get ten thousand people slaving away over little apps, each one hoping to be this guy. He's the guy in the casino who hits on the slots. The casino definitely wants to make sure all the rubes see the pile of money he gets.

I get it. Here you have a developer who just wanted to make games, and maybe a bit of money. He creates a hit, by accident, with a game that has addicting gameplay (and it is, I personally love it).

Then everyone in the media calls his game crap and accuses him of cheating the system (without producing any proof). I'd quit too.

I don't know if I agree with this. I was just talking to my friend about Flappy Bird reviews. When I first got Flappy Bird in early February, the button to rate the game was in the same place where I usually tapped to make the bird fly. Since the "Rate this App" button appeared so quickly after losing the game, I almost rated the app like 5 times in just a couple of minutes. I would like to see the different versions of the app and when this feature / bug was introduced.

Bad/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 think the story of this game exemplifies the fact that content needs a minimum amount of attention to reveal it's true value.

The journey of Flappy Bird appears to me like this:

Stage 1: Almost no attention, almost no growth

Stage 2: Some kind of grey market paid downloads / ratings service

Stage 3: Attention of minimum critical mass of early consumers (increase in audience of 1 or perhaps 2 orders of magnitude)

Stage 4: Attention of influencers on other platforms, especially pewdiepie on youtube (increase in audience by a couple of orders of magnitude)

Stage 5: Attention by large community of enthusiasts (increase in audience by a couple of orders of magnitude)

Stage 6: Mass market attention

where each stage is dependent on the one before it, with the exception of stage 2, which is performed externally.

What's interesting to me is that the qualities the game possesses, which were sufficient to carry it from stage 3 to stage 6 without promotion on the part of the dev, were not sufficient to propel it from stage 1 to stage 3. We could say that the true quality of the game was unknown in stage 1.

My personal opinion is that the vast majority of content created languishes in the equivalent of stage 1 for its particular ecosystem. Of this content, the vast majority will be garbage, a small minority will be reasonable and a tiny minority will have the potential to be a widespread hit. But of this last group, most or all of it will never emerge from stage 1 because stage 1 does not provide it with enough attention to separate it from the rest of the (bad) stage 1 content.

Increasingly I think that the journey to stage 1 to stage 3 is the most important, most difficult and most overlooked part of the progression.

For example, when something is submitted to HN, from my anecdotal observation it will typically get something like 5-10 simultaneous visitors from the new page. If it gets a minimum critical mass of votes to hit the front page, this will increase immediately to something like 50-100 simultaneous viewers and increase from there. But often, it only takes 3-5 upvotes for it to hit the front page. So the relatively trivial actions of the small critical mass of early consumers has an extraordinarily large effect on the dissemination of the content. Indeed, as a content creator, it's often struck me that the actions of those first 3-5 people have an equivalent significance, in terms of the world's experience of my content, to me as the creator.

And if you create good content, then just getting to the front page is by far the most difficult part of the process, because once there you will naturally attract upvotes from the vastly increased exposure. But with only a few random bits of cosmic entropy set differently, the creator could create exactly the same content, fail to get those first 3-5 votes, and the number of views on the article/app/etc. could be 10 rather than 10,000 or 100,000.

In my experience, lots of platforms follow the same model. Reddit is a very obvious one, but the same holds to for trying to get press interest: so much depends upon the decisions of a few key journalists, and that decision may depend on how many other emails hit their inbox that hour, or whether or not they've had their coffee yet, or some other particle of background entropy. This isn't a criticism of the press, it's just a consequence of the current system. The same is true for people who run influential blogs or social media accounts with large followings, or newsletters.

The problem is that there is less attention available per item of content than the minimum quantity of attention needed to rate the quality of that content well. When I create something new, my worry is never "Boy, I hope that people don't simply dislike this," it's always "Boy, I hope that enough people see this to give it a shot of achieving its potential, whatever that turns out to be." If it turns out people don't like it, which is of course always a possibility, that's fairly easy to handle. If it disappears into obscurity, that's much more difficult to accept.

When I create content now, my promotion strategy is 99% focused on that first stage. If it reaches that critical mass of attention among a small number of early, influential people, I feel like my job is done and the chips should fall as they may. If it reaches that initial critical mass, people will want to write press stories about it and post it on social media and ask for interviews and tell their friends about it, assuming its any good. This may be an obvious conclusion, but the interesting part, for me, is that the initial critical mass is much smaller, much more random and much more difficult to achieve than most people realize.

This illustrates an important point:

Information costs nothing to replicate, but it's attention that is the great scarce commodity of the information age. I expect to see extreme escalation in the sophistication of methods for getting peoples' attention in the coming years.

I think people are unwilling to accept luck as an explanation. This might especially be true for the HN audience, because so many of us work so hard hoping to have a success like this.

This is a good example of the "Lemming Economy" that mobile phones have created, and which I cannot heap on enough derision.

The Lemming Economy follows a model where dozens upon dozens up near pointless applications are created in an attempt find just something that will get enough momentum to drive an ever increasing number of lemmings over the cliff (purchase). Upon succeeding more lemmings scramble to create copy-cats of the game to cash in on the stampede. There's no point except to try and generate cash out of they prevailing whims of the lemmings.

This model neither creates a viable business model (because you can't rely on quality equaling sales) nor useful software (because that doesn't drive the lemmings over the cliff).

Maybe Flappy Birds isn't horrible, I don't know. But the developer obviously didn't like getting caught in the stampede and all of a sudden getting exposed to the general population. I would have taken down the app, too.

I 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 that perpetuates the winner-takes-all mechanism we all have come to know. An ideal system would surface quality content while ensuring equal footing for up-and-comers and wannabe competitors. It looks to me that the answer lies in a complex ranking algorithm that makes heavy use of statistical analysis instead of a set of unproven assumptions and a devil-may-care attitude toward keeping things simple to meet the lowest expectations and nothing more.

If "getting famous" is such a devastating thing for an app developer, quit making games for popular devices. There is plenty of scientific computing projects that are far more interesting and have tiny audiences... lack of fame surely awaits you!

So removing the app from the store doesn't turn off the ad revenue unless he kills his ad account. Removing it could be kind of a shrewd way to boost downloads one last time before people move on.

Flappy Bird is pretty much the definition of a black swan. I hope people don't take too much away from it other than: huh, that's weird.

The 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...

The most interesting question to me is what is you guys' experience with seeding app store reviews?

It seems that it definitely worked in that case (any many maybe more we don't know about). Are there some white hat review services, with people that actually download the app? Or is it all just black bot spammer'y?

I don't hate the guy, but what does get me is that some unethical paid download service and a whole lot of luck seemed to be the deciding factors for success, certainly not the game's quality. I wonder if it's gonna get better or worse in the near term. Pretty discouraging if you make games.

Flappy Bird's the first app with onscreen banner advertising I've happened upon for years and my god it's disgusting to have these crappy looking ads constantly sliding onto the top of the screen. I sincerely hope paid or otherwise bankrolled apps continue to be prevalent.

In the linked article, the writer claims that by using AdMob, he left $1M on the table... I'm curious - where does this claim come from? The fact that he could have sold the app? Or is there a different untapped revenue stream?

I feel that instead of taking the game down he could use the money that he was getting from the game and give it to charity. That way he could still live the simple life that he wanted while doing something positive as well.

The most important number about Flappy Bird is 4.

From dying you can be back flying again in less than 4 seconds and be back at the first obstacle in less than 8 seconds. There are many games that should learn from that.

Interesting article.. but I'd be careful about scraping anything from iTunes. This could easily be classified as wire fraud in the US (and there is already precedent with someone being convicted).

But the question is, what did he do in December that jump started his downloads? Or, if he didn't do anything, what happened that started the rise in downloads/reviews?

I really doubt anyone really got 9999. Not being cynical but what is the odd of so many ppl getting that thigh score?

Im convinced more people talk about this game than actually play it.

Obviously, this is the ultimate conclusion:

1. Make Flappy Bird 2. 3. Profits

What was his marketing experiment?

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.

I love Flappy Bird. Period.

To be honest like realy honest, i couldn't careless. The guy was making more money than me and given my current situation, i can't feel not even the most tiny drop of empathy for him. Don't even like the game.

I would guess there was done kind of foul play and Apple said cut that out, here is a check for x amount of dollars. Just take the app down and let's forget about this.