Does posting here require, or even indicate, that I “care”? You’re really saying that all these thousands of posts a day - just here - mean each poster “cares”? Doubt it very much.
I don’t care. I don’t give two shits in a tin pot. But it’s being discussed and I have a viewpoint to share and I’ve done so.
Whether it’s graphics, publications, video, presence or software, I think there are certain standards that developers should meet. It goes beyond taste or preference - I see MANY things I loathe the very look of, but can’t fault the design.
I am a little rusty as a programmer and never was a full-time pro at it, but my function through most of my corporate era was UI design - first as a reviewer, and eventually I was one of the first generation to design the user experience first and have the programmers build it. (As opposed to letting the programmers put a screen port on every internal module, because that’s how they saw it.) Esthetics, efficiency and usability are integral to everything I’ve done for 30+ years, whether anyone appreciated the detail work or not.
I have minimal app programming skills because I haven’t had anything (yet) call for building an app, but I understand the process from pretty much all sides. There is absolutely no skilled effort in Flappy Birds - any programmer passingly familiar with the development tools could turn out a clone in less than a day. Which is about all the developer put into it. If you want to call it “simple,” feel free. It is. It’s also absurdly crudely made to have achieved such wild success, and the actions of the developer indicate either a very sophisticated agenda, embarrassment, or - honestly - some degree of mental illness.
Do I care? No. Why do so many of you feel a need to defend it as “elegantly simple” instead?
Yeah, it’s primitive, and lacks a lot of features that even a simple game should have. So do thousands of other portable game apps in the stores. The only reason anyone’s even complaining about this one’s crudity is that, for whatever reason, it took off. And yeah, that reason probably was mostly luck. So what? Congratulations to the developer for getting lucky.
Yeah, sometimes stuff like the Flappy Bird craze just happens. You can’t plan for success like that.
It’s not a bad little game. It’s a diverting time-waster that, whether by accident or design, is surprisingly well balanced. It teeters right on the edge of being too frustrating to endure, but you always feel like you’re one more game away from succeeding.
I wasn’t actually complaining about anything… just mystified by those who look at a failed early-80s Atari game on their iPhone and find it charmingly simple.
And all good wishes to the developer… whichever mental hospital he’s chosen to hide himself and his charming simplicity in.
I don’t see why people were giving the programmer shit about it, but I must admit that when I saw it on my wife’s phone, I scorned it. It’s just the kind of maddening one-trick repetitive crapola written as an experiment while learning to code that used to clog up the downloads sections of dial-up BBSes. Jesus, I’m so glad I don’t have to wade through this kind of crap for entertainment anymore. This is worse than Daleks. It gives me wiggins thinking about being in thrall to a tedious game like this.
That said, I don’t see why people are actually angry, especially if it isn’t invoking bad memories of spending two hours in the middle of the night to download some drek that once again turns out to be just another carpal-tunnel-bait purgatory that now and then someone will have the chutzpah to ask a shareware fee for. Next somebody will be raking in ad dollars for that one-line recursive Basic racing game typed in from a magazine. Get out of my head!
Something doesn’t smell right about all this. The developer’s making 50K per day, and pulls the game because people are being mean to him on the internet? Doesn’t compute.
The craziness on ebay/craigslist doesn’t make sense either. Thousands of dollars for an iPhone with flappy birds loaded on it? Doesn’t compute.
There’s got to be something else going on here. Could this be a viral marketing campaign of some sort? Perhaps the game was purchased by another developer, and everything going on around that is a way to drum up news? The ebay auctions made Reuters, so if that was the plan it worked.
I’m not sure what’s going on, but it can’t be as straightforward as ‘developer abandons smash hit game because the internet.’
I haven’t heard anything about ebay and craigslist, but are people seriously buying phones with the game loaded on it? Hell, I’ll sell my ipad if someone wants to pay me a grand for it!
That is crazy.
Are you thinking this is all made up because a bigger company bought flappy bird and wants to make it more well known that it already was?
And if a bigger company bought it, why wouldn’t they just put it back in the app store, instead of lettingpeople sell a free game for big bucks? They could charge $.99 and still make amfortune for doing virtually nothing.
I agree with you thst something doesn’t smell right. Even if the developer stops the game from being uploaded ever agwin,mhe is still going to make his $50k a day in ad recenue (is that even possible?).
If he sells it, I assume he loses that permanent stream of income. So why sell?
I have no idea what is going on, unless flappy bird is a program that contains a virus that runs in the background on each machine while the game itself is played. It could easily be doing that, and sending out information on my ipad, for instance and i’d never know it.
I doubt that’s what’s going on, but something seems amiss with this whole story.
I think we haven’t heard the end of the story. Either everything we’ve seen is much as it seems to be, meaning the author is deranged and it’s catching, or this is an elaborate marketing plan that may have sailed off a cliff.
Many, many years ago, there was a silly catchphrase on the early forum I participated in. IIRC, it was something about being attacked by a tap-dancing knifethrower, summarized by a phrase worth resurrecting in honor of this stupid game/clusterfuck.
I presume that that drawing is just shill-bidding by the seller trying to trump up interest.
As for the developer, yeah, it’s easy enough to say “Money good” and leave it at that, but think about it. If you or I had spent a couple of days making a dinky little game just for fun, and ended up getting six figures from it every couple of days, I think we’d be pretty weirded out by that, too. And he may well already have enough money from this thing to be set for life, and just has no clue what he would even do with money beyond that.
In case you don’t want to spend $1,200 on an iPad with Flappy Bird on it, you can just play FlapMMO. Which is you and a bajillion other people all playing flappy Bird simultaneously.
Everyone else is “ghosted” and don’t interfere with you but it’s a never ending river of suicidal poorly rendered birds.
I have to say, Flappy Bert is actually fun to play.
Bert’s laugh when you successfully get him through the pipes, or his “Oh, Ernie” when you smack the pipe is very funny.
There are also people selling copies of Flappy Bird for a dollar or two on ebay, so anyone that HAS to have it could get it very cheaply. (Assuming the software works as advertised.)