Dong Nguyen is the most important mobile games developer on the planet today. Don’t ever expect to hear from him again.
Nguyen, developer of the hysterical hit “Flappy Bird”, did the unbelievable and withdrew his incredibly add
ictive game from the various app stores after it became too popular.
Nguyen claims to have taken the game down because it was “an addictive product” in his words. His other high-performing games Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block both have the same 8-bit retro graphical UX and simple game controls but are “harmless”.
His other games obviously benefit from the success of Flappy Bird, yet he did not build in any kind of cross-promotion between his games.
The best apps do one thing, and they must do it exceptionally well. The same applies to mobile games: game play should implement one gaming principle as its main gaming mechanic.
Flappy Bird uses the gaming principle of “deceptive difficulty”. As its name suggests deceptive difficulty works by confusing the player as to the real level of difficulty of the game. Often this is implemented by letting the player work through easy levels as they learn the controls and the rules. It also works as enticement for them to keep on playing through harder levels.
One excellent example of this is Angry Birds (hmm, maybe this is a “bird game” thing after all…). It’s deceptively difficult. It uses the digital equivalent of a slingshot which most people intuitively understand, but it’s not as easy as it looks. Angle and power need to be balanced to get the perfect shot (most levels can be solved with a single, properly placed bird). Looks easy? But it’s not.
“How hard can this be?”
Nguyen’s game skipped the learning and confidence-building stages. The game controls are exceedingly simple – tapping the phone screen is the only user action – which adds to the deceptive difficulty effect.
The seeming ease-of-play coupled with the extreme difficulty of getting anywhere in the game (most players would be sweating profusely if they made it to five points) simply enflamed players’ egos. The relatively short few seconds before players smacked into anything and killed off their birds encouraged players to try again and again since they hadn’t invested a great deal of time in navigating a level. This created a kind of negative-reinforcement loop – perhaps the “addictive” nature of the game that so bothered Nguyen – that drove players to play again, and again, and again.
Although it’s apparent when the viral spike in downloads happened, nobody to this days knows why it happened. The developers did not invest in any kind of marketing, and certainly not any viral campaigns, yet the game’s meteoric rise to the top of the charts came about only by its virality. In short, its success is probably due to the following IM (or DM, however you’d like to call it) sent by tens of thousands of frustrated players: “OMG. Dude, you’ve got to try Flappy Birds. It’s impossible!”
Of course having a YouTube video posted titled “FLAPPY BIRD – DON’T PLAY THIS GAME!”, or a mainstream article “Let Me Tell You The Time That I Played ‘Flappy Bird’ For 8 Hours” screams for this game to be played.
Reportedly at its peak this game took in $50,000 a day, all of it from ads. This incredible number obviously comes from the sheer volume of downloads (45 million or more) and game-plays (45 million times does anyone really know?). The press is wondering how he can turn off this money-making machine by killing off his game, while conveniently forgetting that existing installs still work and will continue to generate revenue until the masses’ attention is directed elsewhere.
On the other hand the idea of scarcity (“I have a game that you can’t have”) may keep people playing it for longer than its viral tail would ordinarily suggest.
The take away for developers from Flappy Birds: clearly “deceptive difficulty” is an ideal gaming principle to implement, although it’s deceptively difficult to do it right (Ahem. Sorry about that.). It’s driven widespread adoption of some of the best mobile games of the last few years, especially among the casual-gamer segment. The key is to figure out how to create a game that is easy to play but very difficult to master.
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