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