A game where you control a bird to fly and dodge Mario-like pipes was one of last year’s most addicting mobile games. Flappy Bird topped the charts back in September 2014 and a little over a year ago from now, it was taken down by its creator on February 10, 2014. This game was so wildly popular that during an interview with “The Verge” creator, Dong Nguyen, reported that he was making $50,000 dollars a day. And even after the original was taken down, its clones were still topping the charts for several weeks to months.
But what exactly made this game so appealing? I believe the key to figuring out how to make a game successful and attractive is by studying popular games like Flappy Bird. If we examine the game itself, the objective of the game is simple: tap the screen to make your bird jump up in order to “fly” past the obstacles and to stop your sprite from touching the ground. Each obstacle you pass, you get one point added to your total score. That’s it. There’s no tricks, no secrets, just one simple game mechanic. Its simple nature is alluring to anyone. There’s no high-level of skill involved. It’s easy to learn and start playing. However, admittedly, it took me several tries to even get one point in the game, and then far more tries to get through the second obstacle.
But having a simple mechanic nor making a game very approachable to anyone will not guarantee you a popular game. Reading other articles that analyzed why Flappy Bird was such a popular game and from my own personal experience, I can conclude that the key to Flappy Bird’s success involved two things: losing in the game was so ridiculing and the unforeseen competitive nature of the game.
Because the objective of the game and the game mechanics were so simple and straight-forward, losing in the game without scoring a satisfying high score was absolutely ridiculing, even when playing by yourself. You just hop through the obstacles and never touch the ground. Everyone who’s played this game realizes that the game isn’t as easy as they thought once they start playing. I know that several of my friends and many reviews have mentioned about how it takes an absurd amount of tries before scoring at all. What makes you play more is that once when you get that first point, you want to try for the second point and so forth. And then you realize, there’s a secondary scoring system and so you try to see how far you can get with that. Once you’re satisfied, you start setting personal goals for yourself like trying to get to 100 and eventually you realize, you’ve just spent several hours in your first sitting of the game.
For me, after I get into a game and played it through for a significant amount of time, I stop playing the game entirely and never return. This happened with Flappy Bird after reaching my own personal goals in a few days after first playing the game. That’s when some of my closest friends told me they started playing Flappy Bird. Flappy Bird became a game where it was a competition to see who could get the best score among my friends. The competition became a new driving force for me and for others to play the game. My Facebook news feed was soon filled with people expressing their love/hate relationship with the game and with people posting their high scores. Flappy Bird was getting free advertisement from its player base through Facebook and Twitter. People just couldn’t stop posting about Flappy Bird.
In summary, Flappy Bird gained much of its success due to its simple game play mechanics and publicity from social media. This had led me to attempting to create a game for this class following a simple mechanic and other things that I believed that made Flappy Bird such an addicting game. This post was not to advertise my game but to show that I was inspired by games like Flappy Bird to create something of my own. I published the game prototype on Kongregate here if you’d like to play:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/DarkNemo/don-hoang-game-prototype
It’s far from being completely finished but it’s a start. Tell me what you think of it by taking the survey in its description box. Also, what do you think about my opinion on Flappy Bird’s success? What do you think is the reason for Flappy Bird’s success?
Game mechanic where flying in between the two green pipes scores you one point. Source: wikipedia.org
I was a fan of Flappy Bird for about two or three months. This post made me think why I was addicted to the game and couldn’t stop playing it. I agree that the simple game mechanics is the key element of the game. There is nothing simpler than just tapping screen. But it wasn’t the primary reason for me. I played Flappy Bird with my friends and we tried to beat each other in gaining the highest score. I wanted to be the first and that was the primary factor why I played the game at first. But later I kept getting the same score for a while and I was frustrated by the fact that my friends kept progressing and I did not. Later I realized that it weren’t my friends I played against, it was me. After that broke my limits and my highest scores started approaching that of my friends.
The game delivered me a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it. But what I enjoyed most was the competition between me and my friends. As soon as two of my friends stopped playing, I lost the interest to the game and quitted it immediately.
I would have to agree with you about the success for flappy bird. The simple game mechanics and publicity from social media were a huge draw for me to get into and keep playing the game. After reading this post, it made me think of another game that became pretty popular for the same reasons (although on a different platform): super meat boy.
I’m not a huge indie game player, but after watching videos of people trying to beat super meat boy online and freaking out continuously, I had to try it out. The mechanics are (almost) as simple as that of flappy bird. You can run around, you can jump, and you can jump back off of walls. There’s only a few buttons, and yet I managed to play super meat boy for days on end screaming at my TV, similar to how I would play flappy bird in class.
Like you said above the ridiculing nature of losing at this game also added to my amusement, even more so than flappy bird. When you touched a saw, super meat boy basically disintegrated, and when you finally beat a level, you could watch a rewind of tens to hundreds of meat boys running through the level in your previous attempts, all failing to reach the end.
To go off liking a game for the extremely simple mechanics, I’m just going to plug From Dust because it’s a game I’m playing now, and I would definitely attribute my like for the game to it’s simple game mechanics (also xbox 360 indie). It’s a completely different type of game, but there are only two buttons to learn how to use, and there is a ton of replay-ability.
I agree that one key to the success of “Flappy Bird” was its simplistic nature, but I think that there is more to it than that. As you already wrote, “Flappy Bird” had a certain way of making you feel bad when you lost, but I feel like it was less about getting a low score, and more about trying to get a better high score. I believe that the thing that makes games like this wildly popular is that they allow you to play against yourself in quick matches. The fact that a game is simple allows anyone to pick it up and play it, but the appeal of newer mobile games is that they can be played on the go. “Flappy Bird” let you start and end a game within seconds. If for example, getting a score of zero took an entire minute, I don’t believe that anyone would have stuck with it long enough to overcome its steep learning curve. The other element that I believe these games possess is that they cannot be beaten, but simply allow you to work against yourself. People are naturally drawn to self-improvement, and these games allow you to test yourself over and over again. I found “Flappy Bird” completely addicting, and although I was always hoping to have the highest score among my friends, I found that I was really just trying to beat myself by one point. The best part of the games was being able to have a run where I won instead of lost.