My thoughts on why Flappy Bird was such a success

Flappy Bird is by far one of the most notorious and well known mobiles games of the last few years, and induced addiction and some unnecessary amounts of rage, with some players even sending the developer death threats and eventually forcing him to take it off the market. A bit of a bittersweet situation in my eyes; a game so successful that you have to take it down. Quite a shame.

But Flappy Bird is also one of the most basic and boring looking games I think I've ever encountered. And half of that is what made it so successful.

For those who have never had the pleasure of playing, Flappy Bird is a 2D side scrolling game where you control a small yellow bird and guide him/her through the games in some pipes that are just there for no real reason (Don't worry about the plot, there isn't one). The bird falls to the ground unless the player taps the screen, where the bird will flay upwards briefly, before plummeting to the ground again. With this insanely easy control scheme, the player must avoid hitting the edge of the pipes, or they will fail and the game will end. One point is earned every time the player successfully passes through a gap.

Again, this game sounds boring and way too easy, so what made it so popular?

Flappy Bird is surprisingly difficult. It has a combination of tight gaps, a small amount of space to adjust the height for each gap, and pixel perfect collision boxes. Your average person would pick it up for the first time and probably barely make it past the first pair of pipes (It took me at least 5 tries to get a single point). When they ultimately fail, they think to themselves "Wait, this game is the simplest thing ever, how come I can't even get ONE point?!".

This kind of thinking would generally get two different kinds of responses. The first one being "Man, FUCK this game!" and then the player would do the sensible thing and uninstall the game. The other response would be more of "Man, FUCK this game! I can beat this game! IT'S SO EASY!" and then the player would keep playing until they get a better score.

The simple premise of the game combined with a surprising difficulty level is almost the games' way of giving the player the middle finger. The player feels compelled to get a better score than a measly 3. I finally decided to give up on it after a few days when I got a score of 78 (however I was tempted to aim for 100 but I remembered I had long list of things I should be doing instead).

Flappy Bird isn't the only game that gets a similar response from a player. Games like Crossy Road, Stack and Cube Jump all have a very basic premise and a basic gameplay mechanic, but are still pretty hard and, not surprisingly, popular.

With this kinda of game design in mind, I decided to create my own mobile-based game, SQNCR, which I talk about in more depth here.

This formula is certainly not a bad one, despite the anger it induces into some of the less mentally stable of mobile gamers. Flappy Bird was a hit after all, and the other games mentioned are doing pretty well too (Despite Crossy Road basically just being a modern rehash of Frogger). I'd be excited to see what other kinds of easy-but-actually-really-hard games we can expect to see in the future that have a little more depth that what Flappy Bird has, which wouldn't be that hard come to think of it...