What a weird article. It feels like the author wanted to convey his insight that the reason fads fade is due to the gameplay having a constrained information density. And then he felt the urge to follow the tradition of anchoring the thesis in a concrete current example, and he chose flappy birds. But flappy birds is not at all an example that satisfies the hypothesis. Flappy bird, as he mentions, was deliberately pulled from the store by its creator. Why didn't he choose pokemon go instead? Because that hasn't fully faded yet? I'm not trying to personally attack the author, I'm just making a comment that the style in this article probably isn't what we want to emulate in our own stuff.

> But flappy flappy birds is not at all an example that satisfies the hypothesis. Flappy bird, as he mentions, was deliberately pulled from the store by its creator.

Meanwhile, there are thousands of clones out there, and people who wanted to play it were and are free to play any of them. So, we can safely gauge if the fad is really gone by popularity of the whole genre it created, not necessarily by the original itself.

That is not entirely true. Most of those clones are not fun at all despite having the same concept. Or they are fun, but not nearly as addictive for some reason. Details of execution matter and original flappy bird somehow got a lot of details right. Randomly downloaded app does not.

It is same as with pc-man and tetris. Most of clones are not fun at all, despite having the same concept.

Source: I played both original flappy and then tried some of clones.

There's a claim (according to wikipedia and other sources) that Flappy Bird was a clone of another game (called "Piou Piou vs Cactus"). I'm not going to argue "which came first", but your comment is intriguing:

1. If Flappy Bird was a clone, what made it more "addictive" or "fun to play" than the original (Piou Piou)?

2. What did clones of Flappy Bird do wrong?

3. How does Flappy Bird's "addictive mechanics" compare/relate to other games that hook players?

4. What about similar schemes/products (non-virtual)?

I mean - what do all these hook into; why and how do they become ultra-popular (seriously - $50K per day for Flappy Bird!), etc?

I and some former coworkers called these types of products (League of Legends could certainly fit in here) "Money Fountains" - relatively simple mechanics (in some cases executed extremely well - I mean, to my eye, LoL is a beautiful and engaging game, despite the basic concepts) that generate for their developers insane amounts of cash, seemingly without end.

All legally.

But at the same time, others trying to follow in the footsteps of the "pioneers" seem to fail more than they succeed. So the question is, why and how to the originals succeed? Is it just luck? First mover advantage? Or is it something else?

> There's a claim (according to wikipedia and other sources) that Flappy Bird was a clone of another game (called "Piou Piou vs Cactus").

Haven't read the Wiki page, or heard of Piou Piou, but I always thought FB was a rip off of Copter, a game for Nokia style phones where you pressed 5 (IIRC) to keep it airborne.

Maybe "original" Flappy was great and I just played crappy Flappy clones, but dying literally within seconds over and over again didn't make me want to continue, I was just instantly bored, stopped playing and forgot it. I don't understand the craze for such a horrible game.

Copter was good though.

Sorry for nitpicking since this wasn't your point at all (and the comment grew, and grew, and grew as I was typing it), but...

> LoL is a beautiful and engaging game, despite the basic concepts

I assume you haven't played much LoL, have you? I've been playing for 3 years and I still consider myself a newbie and not only mechanics wise but also (or even specially) game-knowledge wise.

140 champions with their own stats (and growth per level), each with at least 4 abilities (+ a passive, some of them taking paragraphs to describe), plus two summoner-spells (to choose out of ~10), each with its own cooldown that you have to track (not only for yourself, but also for the enemy). ~250 items that modify up to 16 different character stats both in flat and % form, many of those with passive and active abilities that modify game rules and interact in often unexpected ways. 19 different types of crowd-control effects that can combine with each other in the same ability. 2 different types of invisibility.

Frantically trying to maximize your gold and experience gains last-hitting minions, while trying to survive and maybe kill the enemy.

In a game with limited knowledge where you can't see most of the map and only have a trinket that gives vision for a very limited time (lack of vision and incomplete knowledge being a feature, sought by the game designers). 4 different types of trinkets, useful for very different situations.

Then there's the neutral monsters in the jungle. 2 types of neutral monster (in each jungle, 4 total) that give you stats for some time if you kill them. 5 different types of dragons that randomly spawn each game. The powerful herald and baron. And there's a guy whose sole reason to exist is to live in the jungle hidden from your vision and come to your lane and ruin your existence surprising you with a 1v2 skirmish.

All of this in a constant flux due to balance changes and new champions regularly introduced (currently ~6 each year) changing the meta-game (or even the game itself). Plus reworks of many old champions that make them even more complex.

And that's the bare minimum! Akin to knowing how chess pieces move. Even the top of the ladder games, where strategical and tactical thought is critical, are simple compared with the complex strategies that eSports teams can carry out.

LoL is probably the most complex game I've ever played. It's just hidden beneath a thin layer of simplicity ("kill, don't die, destroy the enemy nexus").

That is what made LoL successful and why I think it can't be compared to Flappy Bird's success.

I never played Piou Piou vs Cactus and have no idea about exact differences. Flappy Bird could not possibly be exact clone down to details about speed, difficulty, how easy it is to start new round, level generation etc. It was done too fast for that and has clearly different graphics. Flappy using familiar popular Nintendo look might have been factor in why people liked it. People are emotionally attached to that plumber.

It does not matter who was first nor who of the two games is better. There is too much luck involved, there was social network effect in play and playstore is not meritocracy.

However, most flappy clones that popup are not fun to play are not fun to play nor addictive.

1.) I have no idea what differences are. It is perfectly possible Piou Piou is more fun.

2.) I suggest you download some and play. Did you played for 20 minutes, did they got you angry while you simultaneously are still hitting "next"? It is safe to guess that not, which is why they did not replaced it.

Some were too slow and no challenge. Others had elaborate long die animation that took you out of mood to continue. Yet others were ugly or reacted slowly to your touches. Just like millions tetris clones out there, despite being theoretically same game, they are not fun.

3.) Pretty similar in concepts.

4.) What about them? All the kids want fidget spinner and dont care about brand. However, all fidget spinner turn well. Clones that don't turn well eventually don't sell and if the stores routinely selled them, fidget spinners would die much sooner. Fidget spinners existed long before everyone discovered them this summer.

> So the question is, why and how to the originals succeed? Is it just luck? First mover advantage? Or is it something else?

You yourself claimed Flappy Bird was not original. Piou Piou had same concept and was first. It is not that originals succeed. It is that randomly once in a while someone succeed. Fidget spinner copies are selling. In flappy bird case, most of clones are bad and thus popularity died with flappy bird being pulled from stores.

Media attention is my guess.

The first Flappy bird was new and exciting. Nobody wrote about clone number 20 that comes out a few years later.

You turned this into a discussion about what is and what is not a clone.

However, when we're talking about fads and popularity, it is much less relevant than what public thinks is and is not a clone.

I was a little surprised to find a Flappy Bird ?clone? front and center in a Las Vegas “family entertainment” arcade a few months ago.

I've seen a couple different app game's made into cabinets at places like there here in NC too. I think Cut the Rope was one.

If anything, Flappy Bird has transcended "fad" and is as much a part of the cultural "game consciousness" as Super Mario. Who doesn't know Flappy Bird is? And who even remembers all those Flash helicopter games that came before it?

Indie GameDev is absolutely a hits driven business. Often I tell people you will learn more from studying some thing like the Autobiography of Keith Richards. Than yet another build a game engine in thirty days book ;)

Html5 "io" games follow similar viral trajectories. But also have some staying power. Once they develop mechanics or features that encourage replay-ablity. Particularly at web scale multiplayer with leaderboards ;)

Some examples for Friday Fun

http://splix.io/

https://starblast.io/

http://zombs.io/

One more http://agar.io/ This one seems to have quite long legs, but no idea how profitable it is.

That's the game that made the genre that people call "io games"

I don't like this trend, that would be like me calling all SNES games "SUPER Games" because most of them were prepended with the word "SUPER", but it's not a descriptor of the genre, just the nomenclature.

Do you have a better name?

How about "Browser-based"?

No, besides browser-based it needs to be massively multiplayer, casual, without rounds (games are endless and you can jump right into an ongoing one) and without registration for it to qualify as an io game.

There are a lot of browser based games that are not "io games". The genre is much more narrow than you think.

zombs is a clone of http://moomoo.io/

I still miss voar.io (now offline, apparently)

This one kind of lost me on it's comparison to Breaking Bad. I could be an outlier here, but I've rewatched Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Walking Dead at least 4 times, probably more.

The reason I don't think I'm too much of an outlier, in that AMC always runs a marathon to both attract new viewers and reconnect existing viewers, and if it weren't successful, I doubt they'd keep doing it.

The article makes some good points about variability and using the story line format to get people hooked, but it's examples and connections seem really tenuous to the overall point.

Given that all the production costs are sunk at this point, the incremental cost of offering as part of a streaming catalog or filling up some AMC broadcast slots as part of an "event" is pretty low.

Pre-streaming, I'm sure a lot more people bought DVD sets of favorite series than actually rewatched them from beginning to end. The same principle applies today I'm sure even in the cases where the content is effectively free.

I'm not sure this example really counts as a fad though. While successive groups rediscover older TV shows (not that the ones you list are very old at all) viewership is rarely going to be more than of a fraction than it was originally. Perhaps there are marginal exceptions for shows that never really had an audience but develop a bit of a cult following over time.

ADDED: The other issue I have with the author's broader theory is that much of what he says is just as applicable to episodic TV shows like Seinfeld as it is to serialized shows.

I would love to create an app that makes $50k a day and lasted even a week. I wouldn't care if it was a fad at that point.

Imaging making that amount of money for a programmer in a developing country (in this case Vietnam), it would be insane, making $20k a year as a developer in my country is considered a well payed job. If you could make $350k in a week that would mean 17.5 years of a "well payed" programming job.

No kidding, if I had made Flappy Bird I’d be writing an article about how my days of working were just a fad.

Interesting timing as a French clone of Flappy Bird - VooDoo (with a ball instead of bird) is currently the top game in Google Play store...

TLDR; conflict,mystery,resolution : are three phases in a cycle to keep you engaged

(akin to the way this article was written)

Author is blissfully unaware that Flappy Bird is alive and well in arcades:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIZvK5yORrw

(video from 2015 but I played one last week)

Didn’t Flappy Bird die because it was pulled from app stores?

The author decided he preferred peace and quiet over leaving flappy bird in the app store.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-flappy-birds-shut-down-201...

Dong Nguyen kept making games, though. His company is called .GEARS, and the successor is Swing Copters:

http://www.dotgears.com/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=DOTGEARS

He also made Ninja Spinki Challenges, which I really enjoyed for a while and has some really cute graphics:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotgears.n...

> Swing Copters

This appears to just be Flappy Bird rotated 90deg [1]. Pretty funny!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuoCeze0B3c

Yes. The dude got harassed more then he cared for. Which is quite sad if you think about it.

Yes, which is mentioned several times throughout the article but I take it you didn't even click the link.

I don't think there is much reason analysing lucky successes. Real success happens by getting a little lucky here and a little lucky there, learning over time how to keep the good fortune once acquired, and then stacking one success over another. Analysing FarmVille and Flappy Bird is like analysing why a lottery winner chose the right numbers.

And in both cases the surprise money is gone just as quickly.

Anybody here remember the pet rock fad of the 70's? The more interesting question to me regarding silly fads like pet rocks, droopy pants, and "Baby On Board" stickers is how they begin.

Because that's what fads do. They're transient by nature, that's why they're called a fad.