Wait I still have it and I don't remember ever seeing add. When news of recall came out I wondered how he got that rich. Now I'm wondering how I fell trough that crack and missed adds era
I remember when the game was pulled from the stores. Some assholes were selling their devices with flappy bird still installed for insane amounts of money.
The game is still up in some torrents and websites. Selling old ass phones the same as a new flagship just because it has a program in it that is still available in the internet is just retarded.
I was coding Indie games when it came out. The number of clones in the community was just disgusting. There was even more than one Flappy Game Jam. If Flappy Bird can be credited with one thing, it's that it made a whole bunch of inept coders think that they too could get rich by making super simple mobile games.
Just because the gameplay was very simple doesn't make it crap. The details (movement speed, the gap between the obstacles) were pretty much on point and that's something that makes or breaks this kind of game.
Last but not least, it had little to none anti-user "features" that plague the modern games. I would choose Flappy Bird over most current games any time of the day. Actually there is no "would" in there as I still have it installed.
There are cheap flappy clones you can get pretty easily.
Hell, take a beginners gaming programming class and make it yourself, if you genuinely love the gameplay that much. Its not that complex, and would probably make a good first project to work towards.
The mechanically identical predecessor games didn't have any anti user elements either. The concept predates that too. If my family had enough money and modern day iffy parenting to give their barely highschool aged kid an iphone I probably could have made quite a chunk of money porting simple games I didn't even come up with to the platform. I hated the ios interface back then too though from trying it when friends were showing off the new toy.
A large part of what made it crap to me both then and now is whatever causes my dislike of GTA even though I enjoyed 100%ing them up to san Andreas, of CoD even though MW2(original) had a special place in my blackened heart for being my first all achievements game, or any sports game other than SNES NHL 98.
I agree with the what you called the details of the game making or breaking it however. The Spider-Man formula just does it for me. Some I just vaguely recall as being fun like older Spider-Man titles, the hulk, prototype, watchdogs, etc., but I still absolutely love gravity rush/daze 1 and 2 as well as the recent Spider-Man games ported from PS. I spent a good chunk of time curled up in a ball, rolling around on the floor while playing gravity rush 1 on ps vita to up the immersion.
You're not wrong, but it was also kind of a cultural moment and it's weird that it was disappeared entirely. Most games like that have long tails of focus creep, neglect, crapware, or irrelevance, but Flappy Bird went out with a pop.
Because it should have NEVER BEEN a pop in the first place. It didn't go anywhere because OP correctly points out, it was done long before. The fact that it went anywhere in the first place is just a testament to humanities mob mentality. We are very easily swayed.