The Bottom Feeder: Why Indie Developers Go Insane:

Think about this. I mean you, personally. Think about what it would take to make you run from a gold mine like this. Really. Think about why someone would do this.


Man, this line from Jeff Vogel on the end of Flappy Bird's run on the App Store has gotten some play in iOS app blogs recently.

Look, guys, Flappy Bird's still here.  It's still on devices that downloaded it before The Great Flappy Bird Culling of 2014.  Thus the stupid [I assume fake] eBay listings of devices that already had the game installed.  He's greatly slowed its pace of adoption -- to nothing -- but his installed user base didn't change and all.  And now, well, who doesn't have a copy of Juggling? 

Nguyen hasn't run from the gold mine; he only slowed the stream. He still has the old mine as it stood on Culling Day, and got a heck of an advertizing boost for his other, smaller, previously ignored (relatively speaking) games.

More interesting to me is considering how the game succeeded.

Bird Gotta Fly: Why Flappy Bird Flew The Coop - Forbes:

Stuart references Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto who studied arcade game players and realized that the appeal of these games โ€œwas born of the players being mad at themselvesโ€ฆ So I would try to analyze how the game made players feel that way.โ€ 

Regardless, don't cry for Nguyen's GEARS, okay?  He's created three fractions of one percent of Wario Ware and apparently lucked into a decent payday from the work.  Good for him, but enough with the pity.

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