Comment by m3mnoch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m3mnoch | Hacker News Reader

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technically speaking?

as a fellow dev with feet traditionally in both worlds (indie and startup), i can heartily say "meh" about both the rant and its the whole "ripoff" thing. you are absolutely correct about the indie guys being different from startup guys by wanting:

1) enough money to keep doing what they love.

2) recognition for what they do.

the threes guys? in the ios app store, their app was in the top 100 grossing list for a month and are still top 300. they've ranked #1 in downloads in 28 countries. and they're still crushing it on downloads.

http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/...

the 1024 guys? their downloads suck. their ratings are a full point worse. they're only lifting to the top 100 in countries that traditionally don't monetize worth beans anyway.

http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/823499224/rank-history/...

yeah.

i choose data over ranty "you hurt my feelings" stuff every time. and, based on said hard, objective data, the threes guys are doing just fine.

*edit - i missed that last '0' on their top grossing stat. whoops.

2048 is the #1 free app

http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/...

yup. making no money.

and, as the threes guys point out, with no longevity. it won't be at the top of the heap for long. then, unlike threes, it will crash out the bottom instead of hanging around.

so, again. meh.

It has in-game ads, so it makes no money in the same way that Flappy Bird was free and made no money.

except flappy bird retained users which led to more ad impressions. i guarantee you the retention for 2048 is crap.

Only the web version is ad-free. The iOS version has ads. Its longevity I believe will be greater compared to the Threes game. What makes you think otherwise - that Threes will stay on the top for longer than 2048?

I believe the point is that 2048 has less gameplay longevity. Threes is designed to be a puzzle game that will last you the rest of your life, and no one has come close to beating it yet. 2048 can be beaten with relatively simple algorithms, so even though it is easier to pick up because its initial learning curve is shallower, people will max it out sooner.

Some of us don't want a puzzle game that will last the rest of our lives. I want something to get obsessed about for a few weeks, then move on to other things. I'd rather 2048 with its winnability (and beyond - I'm after its 8192 milestone now) than something nigh unto unwinnable.

BTW: I know there's ads on the 2048 iOS app, but don't see them. I'm barely aware of anything when playing.

in a word? retention.

of the magical kpi beast, that's the single, most important metric. this is something i cut my teeth on hard as an mmo guy -- you wouldn't believe the amazing realtime monitoring of these numbers going on by homegrown services like soemon in the mmo space.

anyway, the growth-hacking startup crowd gets all riled up about install numbers where the game folks are only concerned about retention. because, if it retains? you can charge money for it. if it retains? it can go viral. if it retains? your ltv will lift. retention is key.

while 2048 is hot for the moment (it's got virality), it doesn't have any retention. i would bet that if you looked at their 7-day retention, it's terrible. everyone discovers the "corner strategy" or gets lucky and drops a big score or beats it. "oh, this isn't hard." it's the opposite of the flappy bird effect.

if you guys want to set a calendar reminder to go back and look at 2048's numbers on april 27th, you'll see it being a shadow of its former self.

building on what zemo said, craftsmanship gets your retention where lean gets you market fit and growth. personally, like i said, i'm a fan of both tactics and i believe they can happily coexist at a lifecycle perspective.

p.s. this is the same phenomenon where folks show their google analytics charts with one, giant spike on the day their post went viral. that's called growth without retention.

Which is a shame for both developers, as retention matters more (financially) for an ad-supported game than a for-pay one.

2048 is Solitaire. It's exactly the same kind of game - the algorithm to beating it is dead simple and you win or lose by the whim of the RNG. As per the words of a person who plays Solitaire every day: "I don't play it because it's challenging, I play it because I need to play with something that requires no thinking for a while".

Also, I don't have an iDevice or a desire to pay for a simple puzzle game, so I have no idea what this "Threes" thing is, other than "kind of like 2048 but you can't win". I've played a lot of 2048 and friends, though. I really like the hexagonal variant.

> 2048 is Solitaire. It's exactly the same kind of game - the algorithm to beating it is dead simple and you win or lose by the whim of the RNG.

You're probably thinking of Klondike or Freecell. Neither of those require much thought and both (Klondike more than Freecell) are quite at the whim of the RNG.

But there are many Solitaires that are almost always winnable and require thinking and not rote algorithms. Try Spider Solitaire [1]. It's almost always winnable, but it will take you 20 to 30 minutes if you're good, and 40 minutes if you are not. I also quite like Sea Haven Towers [2]—it's like freecell, but the rules make it a little tougher. It requires some nice lateral thinking at times.

In those games the RNG only decides the difficulty of the game, not whether or not it's beatable (obviously occasionally it isn't, but it's very rare for both of those games).

[1] http://greenfelt.net/spider

[2] http://greenfelt.net/sht

Would it not be fair to say that because 1024 is free it's taking sales away from Threes? They might be doing fine, maybe they deserve to do better.

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