Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Says App 'Gone Forever' | Hacker News Reader

Flappy Bird Creator Dong Nguyen Says App 'Gone Forever'

forbes.com

50 pointsdnqthao41 comments

Your chance of death multiplied exponentially with each gate you passed.

Because math doesn't matter, but words are cool when you're a writer. Aaargh.

I'm no Flappy champion, but I'm pretty certain there is very little diffuculty-ramping. It's certainly not getting exponentially more difficult.

> I'm no Flappy champion, but I'm pretty certain there is very little diffuculty-ramping. It's certainly not getting exponentially more difficult.

Exactly. Unlike other infinite fliers the game doesn't get increasingly harder. The speed, pipe distances and sizes are all constant.

The thinking here is probably along the lines of having an X% chance to die every gate, eg 10%. Then the 'difficulty' or likelihood of surviving is 0.9^n with n as the score etc. It's not really accurate, but you can get where the 'multiplied exponentially' is coming from.

That said, the game is actually about luck the better you are at it - if you are skilled enough to always get through the gap if your bird starts near the gap, then the difficulty comes down to chance - how far away the gaps are vertically from each other at each step.

The article is poorly phrased no matter what the thinking behind it was. It says your chances of death increase with each gate you pass. If there's no difficulty ramping that's simply not true.

That's like saying your chances of rolling another head after rolling 1000 heads are smaller. They're not. It's still 50/50.

I've seen a lot of people comment that he's giving up $50,000 per day. As so many people already have the app (and it's not being deleted from their devices remotely) isn't he still going to be receiving that ad revenue, it just won't be increasing anymore? A cynic might say he announced the 24 hour deletion to get as many people as he could to download it, because even after it was deleted they would be playing the game and he would be earning.

I was thinking the same thing. In a way it might even extend the lifetime of the fad, instead of starting to die out this being spread over the news gives a fresh impulse to make people show the game to others. The 24 hour window adds another element to talk about. People telling eachother "You can only get it the next few hours". Followed by people checking if it is really gone, and (hopefully) playing the game again, or lending their phones to others who didn't get it.

If he really wanted it all to stop he could just update it to remove the ads en delete it after. Without announcing it on twitter.

Not that I blame him, he got lucky and if these are all marketing moves, well, good job :)

I don't think they are marketing moves...

I don't think they are marketing moves either. But I think the reasoning is right, he did consider the money he will still earn in his decision.

By the end, I guess he would make more money keeping it on the store (hard to find a math where this 24 hours peek would pay off a few more months of declining downloads).

So I guess he did some math and thought "I already have my FU money, so FU fame!" :D

So the choice is about preferring $2 million and peace of mind, instead of $5 million and people annoying him 24/7. Not the "I give up of all the money for the JD Salinger's lifestyle" as the press is framing this.

I believe in what he said, like this guy did: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/02/11/the-bird-l...

And as a Vietnamese, I can tell you that those fking mass media in VN is totally ruining his life. I admire him so much for his zen-like life style.

This is another key weaknesss of the iphone.

I have it installed on my Android phone, but even if I didn't, I could download the .apk and install it (because nothing is ever gone on the internet), but you can't do that in a walled garden.

I'm pretty sure you could jailbreak the device and install the ipa from somewhere. And it's not a weakness of the iPhone. It a reason you personally wouldn't buy one but for the vast vase majority of people this will never ever matter.

"It's not a weakness" because it doesn't matter for most people? That makes no sense.

I meant in the sense that by enabling that feature there are also security issues introduced to the platform and for most people those costs outweigh the benefit gained by adding the feature. So if you look at it as a missing feature you could consider it a weakness. If you look at the effects of introducing it to the platform, overall, leaving it out is not a weakness - it's a smart decision.

Sideloading doesn't really introduce security issues. Security against malware on iOS is provided by sandboxing, not by Apple's approval process, which is far too cursory to detect any serious malware.

Rubbish. It's about as much of a risk as letting a user do anything. Google even have a service that scans installed apks for known bad ones if you want to share everything you do with them. Apple could do something similar if they decided user choice wasn't evil and bad after all.

>This is another key weaknesss of the iphone.

The ability to respect the wish of the app author that wants it gone?

Just because it's the wish of the author, doesn't mean it's imperative that we respect it. Much like the King in the Little Prince, the wishes must be reasonable. And wishing that the app would completely vanish is not reasonable.

Umm why?

Why, what? Why must wishes be reasonable? Or why is that wish unreasonable?

Every platform has the ability. Just don't download it. Boom, done. You're respecting his wishes. What the iPhone has is the ability for Apple to enforce it.

I guess you probably consider Amazon's ability to remotely memory-hole books on Kindles good too. How about having all thought and speech remotely pre-screened for anything that could potentially offend someone?

Censorship is bad.

Please get over Flappy Birds as soon as possible. The lessons to learn are: simplicity in difficulty is key (see: The Impossible Game[1]), mobile game advertising has /horrible/ ROI, and the tech world is too easy to whip itself into a frenzy caused by its own feedback.

The only reason this is still a story (Flappy Bird pre-installed iPhones, knockoffs galore, etc) is because it's a story in itself. I feel really sorry for this guy.

[1]: http://flukedude.com/theimpossiblegame/

Well said. Does anyone really care if he forgoes millions?

That game has horrible input lag. Flappy Bird doesn't/

speaking of simplicity in difficulty: Super Hexagon :)

"It happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem," he explained as he chain smoked cigarettes.

Except in my heart where it still flaps. And my phone where it's still installed. And as a weird internet ("mobile" = internet) historical relic, akin to crazy frog.

And, according to a quick search, torrent trackers.

Hmmm... [emotive action] "Verb" [emotive avatar] "Noun".

I'm sure there's a formula here: Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Crazy Frog, Stupid Long-horses.1

Some stretches... Gangnam (flappy) Style (horsey Korean pop-star), and Kony 2012 was flappy bullshit activist. Mario? Plucky plumber... etc

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8aqjh/awww_this_is_jus...

Zero Wing

Someone pull this guy to Singapore. If he was afraid of success he never would had tried to promote the product.

Quote. I also think there's more than what he said behind what happened. For sure.

Why Singapore?

Because it's nearby and capitalist. He will have access to far better resources and no state issues.

Many people think they want fame, until they get it. I'm sure continual death threats and every gaming web site falling iver itself to decree your game one of worst ever would lead to me just shutting up shop.

idk, I think I'd laugh all the way to the bank.

Yep. At 50k/day, it's enough to ignore most people and shut up the worst easily (I'd love to see someone sue Gawker, for example).

Except this move has the opposite effect on most people. The best move would have been to do absolutely nothing (except monetize).

Flappy Bird is a fun game, but to me it also demonstrates how broken mobile advertising seems to be. He's generating revenue from ads that pop up at the top of the screen that quickly vanish on the next tap of your finger. How could any advertiser possibly hope to get any value out of what they paid to have that happen?

It's the users I feel bad for, the people who wanted to play this thing but will now never get the chance to.

Oh the humanity!

That said, there are already like 100 clones of the app out there, some even with identical graphics and levels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com