The Pains of Tech Profit

The Story of Flappy Bird & Swing Copters

Adam Beasley

Teens React to Flappy Bird

Flappy Bird’s Success Flappy Bird- by Dong Nguyen

Only took a few nights of coding to create

Brought in $50,000 in ad revenue per day

50 million total downloads

#1 game on App Store and Google Play Store for a month

"The reason Flappy Bird is so popular is that it happens to be something different from mobile games today, and is a really good game to compete against each other," Nguyen says. "People in the same classroom can play and compete easily because [Flappy Bird] is simple to learn, but you need skill to get a high score."

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5383708/flappy-bird-revenue-50-k-per-day-dong-nguyen-interview

So Why Did He Remove It? Messages he received about addictive nature of the

game Nguyen tells me of e-mails from workers who had lost their jobs, a

mother who had stopped talking to her kids. "At first I thought they were just joking," he says, "but I realize they really hurt themselves.“

According to Nguyen, who had trouble in school because of his own addiction to Counter-Strike, those messages were a major reason why he opted to put an end to Flappy Bird. When asked by the interviewer why he ultimately pulled the app, he said "I'm master of my own fate. Independent thinker."

He couldn’t handle the media attention “The local paparazzi soon besieged his parents' house, and he

couldn’t go out unnoticed. While this might seem a small price to pay for such fame and fortune, for Nguyen the attention felt suffocating.”

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/11/flappy-bird-dong-nguyen-interview/

New Game by Nguyen – Swing Copters Swing Copters was released a few months

after Flappy Bird was removed from the App Store Uses same difficult mechanics

Very simplistic coding

Not nearly as successful

By this past afternoon, Swing Copters was in the top 500 iPhone revenue chart of only two countries: No. 286 in Uruguay and No. 476 in Latvia.

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/swing-copters/

Important Take-Away for Business

Gaming is BIG!

Unpredictable Consequences of Your Business

Ethical Decision Making

Definition of Success

The Simplest Ideas Can Be The Most Successful

Follow-up Success Is Often More Difficult Than Initial Success