This year can be safely called the year of Flappy Bird. The Vietnamese developer’s project has become a banner, a model, a dream for many independent teams. But does this dream have anything to do with reality?
Yesterday we touched on this topic a little in a conversation about Timberman, which today the Western press calls “the new Flappy Bird”. Journalists can be understood. They constantly need catchy news stories, and the high visibility of the application in mobile stores is an excellent reason. Another thing is that not everyone can explain finding the game at the top of the top: without seeing the whole situation, it is easy to make a mistake when building cause-and-effect relationships.
So, what does it look like from the outside?
A cheap game in visual terms comes out and soars to the top of the tops.
A miracle?
From the outside, yes, considering that high–quality content and more thought-out projects in terms of mechanics often drag out a miserable existence somewhere at the very bottom of the food chain.
How really?
Dong insisted that he had not spent a single dollar on promotion. And by the way, they still believe him. The opinion of Carter Thomas from BlueCloud Solutions, who believes that the developer used bots, to put it mildly, is not popular.
In the latest 83rd issue of Sergey Galenkin’s podcast, Maxim Donskikh, vice president of Game Insight, noted that Dong “found a hole in the leaderboards in the App Store and made a powerful viral mechanism out of it, which was then closed. Therefore, the success of Flappy Bird cannot be repeated, simply because the technology with which they scored hellish installations no longer works.”
The situation with other projects (“new Flappy Bird”) is also devoid of evidence.
To launch the “word of mouth” Make It Rain, developers invested $ 1,000 in advertising on Facebook.
The authors of Let It Goat, which was considered another “Flappy Bird killer” for a couple of weeks, have 4 million followers on Vine.
Timberman became a phenomenon after the Apple feature.
In other words, there is no place for a miracle. There is a trend, there is a situation when developers learn to promote mobile projects in non-obvious ways, but no more.
Sergey Orlovsky, the founder of Nival, said the following in an interview with us this spring: “These projects were made according to completely different principles, different from those by which successful games are usually made.”
And, really, all these are experiments, starting from mechanics, ending with methods of promotion. And this means, again, yes: the mobile games market is just being formed today.
Source of inspiration: http://recode.net/2014/07/15/your-game-is-not-the-next-flappy-bird/