Why was “Flappy Bird” so popular and what happened to it?

GamerBolt: "In short, Dong Nguyen’s “Flappy Bird” is a no-frills mobile game which provides exactly the sort of experience it advertises."

[admiralvic]

"Why was “Flappy Bird” so popular"

Sigh~ Why can't people really look into things? Flappy Bird didn't become popular because of "an understated brilliance present in Flappy Bird", but most likely due to stat manipulation, which is an ongoing problem on the app store.

Take a look at this chart thanks to BlueCloudSolutions:

http://www.bluecloudsolutio...

Now, a lot of people seem unaware that Flappy Bird actually released in May of 2013, so it was out there for MONTHS before anyone noticed it or gave 2 sh*ts about it. What most likely happened was Dong Nguyen got some bots / people / paid a service / whatever and they spammed the game with "fake" reviews and praise, which resulted in the app getting noticed and taking off. You can read more into it here http://www.bluecloudsolutio... .

Anyway, once it went viral I think a lot of people were interested in what it was and that lead to a bunch of articles being made about it. So many that it's the 6th highest game on N4G in terms of degrees, putting it just above The Last of Us... Since everyone was talking about it (I mean, the app was "removed" like a month ago, yet people are still writing about it), it got a lot of traction and then it probably went truly viral.

As far as it being removed, there was probably going on behind the scenes or maybe it was due to death threats. A lot of these "suspiciously removed" and "out of nowhere" things are linked to something that isn't stated. I won't get into a long winded theory, but there was most likely something else going on in the background.

In either case, the game most likely got popular because of manipulation and it was most likely removed over something going on in their life. It has very little to do with quality, substance of any of that stuff.

[iamnsuperman]

Whatever he did to get it there the game ended up becoming a hit. That is due to, what I feel people misunderstand about mobile games, its simplicity (which is not a bad thing). All mobile games that go viral are incredible simple but are addictive because there is that challenge/competitiveness there.

It would be interesting to know exactly why it was removed but at the end of the day something new will replace it which will be copied hundreds of times and killed

[Gazondaily]

Cheers for the links. I kind of suspected that's what happened. Still; he made his money and dashed off the lucky sod.

[admiralvic]

" I kind of suspected that's what happened."

Well, it's all heresy as none of this can be proven, but it seems more likely something foul happened.

1) The app just got popular out of nowhere like 8 months after releasing.
2) As the article I linked to indicates, his other apps got the same boost at the same time.
3) A lot of the first reviews were oddly long and repeated the same phrases.
4) After coming out of nowhere on N4G, the like 5th and 6th Flappy Bird articles were guides, which scored over 800 degrees.You can check the user that uploaded them, but besides those 2 articles I believe only one of their other articles hit 200+ degrees and it was about GTA V.
5) The Flappy Bird article that hit an unheard of 1,200+ degrees had the most topic moderation I've ever seen on N4G. Even on big 1,000+ degree articles you'll still see trolling, off topic, spam and the like going unreported .
etc

I mean, it's entirely possible that the app went viral, people looked into his other apps (or another app went viral and then Flappy Bird went super viral or something), several people wrote really long winded and similar reviews, the article managed to legitimately hit 800+ degrees (only two guides I've ever seen hit that high) and the other one hit 1,200+ degrees (one of the hottest* articles I've ever seen on N4G), though the chances of that are so impossible it's laughable to even consider it.

* I checked the PS4/XB1 tags and there were 3 total articles in the 1,200 degree range, but the highest one was still 50 degrees short of that one Flappy Bird article. Yes, that one article was apparently hotter than anything with the PS4 or XB1 tag...

[johny5]

The guy made a Angry bird/Mario rip off and profited a lot from it so there could have been Legal problems?

Some say he left when it shot to the top of the carts because he couldn't handle the heat plus the fact most games like this don't stay at the top for long!

He also could have profited from illegal means like that fake reviews thing?

He made the money he wanted and bounced basically!

[admiralvic]

"so there could have been Legal problems?"

I honestly believe it was stress.

I think he boosted all his apps via bots (like the article I posted above shows) and was trying to get them some attention (oddly enough, Flappy Bird seemed to be the least popular). However, what happened was Flappy Bird really took off and this lead to problems.

1) A lot of people called him out for using bots or something along those lines to make his apps popular.
2) Several people pointed out how derivative Flappy Bird was. For instance, people were calling it a clone of Piou Piou vs Cactus.
3) It reused assets from Mario (pipes).

I think all the attention backfired, because there was so much negative press coming at him that he eventually pulled in hopes of making it stop. Now, I could be wrong, but I could see all the drama related to the app being the real reason.

[andreasx]

1. Make a rip off-game
2. ??????
3.profit

[GentlemenRUs]

I thought we were done with these articles... Guess not.

[Joelwow]

agreed, I tried of these stuffs

[Mulletino]

I think he took it down because he wanted to rip off Piou Piou vs. Cactus for a few bucks then it went viral and people started calling him out on it.