The defining feature of Flappy Bird is that it’s nearly impossible. Being able to steer that bird through those tubes is almost as unlikely as the success that the game’s creator, Dong Nguyen, has enjoyed and, more recently, become exasperated with. But not quite. Many others would love to trade places with him. A wave of rip-offs has hit app stores since Flappy Bird’s emergence from nowhere last month, and some of the newcomers have been pretty successful.
At the same time, people are looking to deconstruct the game to unearth previously undiscovered rules for viral mobile gaming success. Simplicity, difficulty, gravity, and some sort of mysterious fraud have all been held up as the secret to the game’s conquest of the app store.
But studying an anomaly like Flappy Bird for clues is like looking for insights in a list of bodegas that have sold winning lottery tickets. Many game industry experts acknowledge that what appeals to people is basically a mystery, and the search for patterns is an exercise in futility. The main insight, from a design perspective, seems to be that people are unpredictable.
It has become much harder for any game to rise on its own merits as the size of the app industry has grown. People spent $10 billion in Apple’s app store last year, but almost all of that money is heading to a tiny number of mega-hits. The cost per install, a measure of how much a developer has to spend on marketing, has grown almost 300 percent in the mobile gaming industry over the past two years, according to analytics firm SuperData. The amount that people spend on games per month is up 38 percent over the same period.