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Comment by bbosh | Hacker News Reader

While this technical analysis is interesting, I'm not convinced it is a significant reason behind Flappy Bird's success. I don't think any other game has created as much of a buzz. When you have your friends telling you to download it, when you see school kids on the train competing with their high scores, when it is featured in every newspaper you pick up, it is no wonder the game was successful. The Apple Store formula doesn't even come into the calculation when you have word-of-mouth. Perhaps it was just a good game that people enjoyed.

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> Perhaps it was just a good game that people enjoyed.

Really? Yeah, I get that it not being a microtransaction-pile-of-garbage probably helped, but did you play it? Seriously, nobody at the beginning could have thought it was good. After the buzz, quality isn't relevant.

The problem is the ranking algorithms. At least on iOS, the relative ranking list doesn't go below 300, so if you're below that, you're invisible. But, if you crack that, you're off to the races (that's how I stumbled on it).

The bigger problem is that rankings don't decay. Candy Crush should be continually falling in the rankings if it isn't growing in order to make way for something new that is.

However, that isn't what Apple wants. Apple wants things that PAY. So, they want their ranking algorithms to keep the things that gross the most money as high as possible as long as possible. So, Apple isn't even remotely interested in "fixing" the problem.

And we come back to, "The walled garden sucks for the consumers."

> Really? Yeah, I get that it not being a microtransaction-pile-of-garbage probably helped, but did you play it? Seriously, nobody at the beginning could have thought it was good. After the buzz, quality isn't relevant.

I learned about it through a girl I'm currently seeing. She is very far removed from the whole tech scene. Her cousin told her to try it, and then she told me to try it and impress her by getting a high score. So I tried it, enjoyed it (masochism involved here), and the very next day my roommate asked me if I knew of the game. We've been competing with each other for high scores ever since.

So yes, at the beginning I thought it was good.

Rankings do decay. Top Grossing rankings are consistent because the top apps have a large user base, from which a small fraction will purchase the iAPs. Those apps do make the most amount of money in the days before.

Free/Paid charts change all the time -- the apps that show up there get the most amount of downloads.

But what was the tipping point? The game was out for 6 months where it got next to no traction.

For indie games, usually any growth only comes after some celebrity or big media outlet mentions it (e.g. Angry Birds took off after some Olympic skier mentioned playing it). There didn't seem to be any such moment with Flappy Bird.

The biggest YouTuber in the world made a video about it - that was most likely the Tipping Point. Now the real question is what was the path it took to get to a PewDiePie video.

PewDiePie posted the video to his YouTube channel on January 27th, but Flappy Bird was already #1 as of January 17th. By the time it went viral with all this word of mouth and news coverage it was already #1. So the most fascinating part (especially on the App Store where a sudden rise like this is so anomalous) is how it took off to the #1 spot in the first place when it had been on the store since May. It might have needed to have all the other ingredients (addictive gameplay, nostalgic art, etc.) to do what it did, but those aren't what triggered it shooting from zero to #1 in a couple weeks.

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