Flappy Bird is very visible right now. Whether we want it or not, it jumps to the top of our news feeds and friend feeds, and our friends are sharing Flappy Bird related links, videos and articles all over the place. I am no different: The game has popped up on my feeds for some time now, but up to today I've been fortunate enough to be able to ignore it. Because, well, let's face it: It's ugly. It's uninteresting. And I rarely take interest in uninteresting things. But this morning it came "closer to home" so to speak, when my son showed the game to me on his phone in the breakfast table. Immediately I knew what it was because it's all over my news feeds and being talked about and blogged about all over the place. So the time of being able to ignore it was over, and perhaps it was about time.

I actually played for a few minutes. The game sucks. And I'm not saying that because it's frustrating, difficult, or whatever (as is commonly described in the articles written about it). There is nothing original in this game. The gameplay mechanics, even the look of the big-lipped bird, were copied from an existing game: The only thing the developer did was to make it look uglier. At least the original had "nice” amateur style graphics, but Flappy Bird opted to make itself pixelized and low resolution. And then of course, as a programmer that spends his time encouraging other programmers to strive for a high standard of technical expertise and quality, the game is really an insult. It's a chart-topping game that would take no longer than a couple of hours to create. Zero quality in terms of technical excellence. After this, how am I now going to convince young people to work hard and develop demanding technology, to push the envelope and innovate new things, when it has thus been demonstrated that you can easily get rich by just churning out trash like Flappy Bird? It really upsets me.

The story of Angry Birds / Rovio is one of my favorite stories to tell young game developers. It's a story of a company that persevered through difficulties and made 51 games, only to find themselves facing bankruptcy and finally decided to "make one more game” that really cracked the pot. It is inspiring and sets a fantastic mindset for building the future. Flappy Bird does not match. Flappy Bird is a story of a game that can be made in a few hours by a drunken beginner programmer. No perseverance is needed. No hard work involved. If games like this would truly become the norm in the industry, then there is no more industry, and there is no future.

So I'm affected. So I spent some time reading about this. And I discovered and learned many interesting things not just about Flappy Bird, but about the (mobile) gaming industry as a whole. Not that it really was anything new: But it's nice to spend some time collating people's opinions in an effort to see a big picture. There are of course many who have tried to dissect the success of Flappy Bird, and to extract "reasons” for it's success in an effort to duplicate the success for their own games. This time around though, generally I don't see much merit in the attempt, as the game is too shallow and empty to really dissect in any form. It's just what it is. But one thing did catch my interest: A particular author argued that one factor in the success of the game is that it does NOT include in-app purchases. Because the players at large have grown tired (or are in the processing of growing tired) of in-app purchases. And this is something that I too have been pondering: When will it be that the playing population gets "clever” enough to see how they are being manipulated by the top selling games? It appears that the time has come, or is about to come. (A side question here: What is your opinion on this? Have YOU grown tired on in app purchases already?)

As the others have also explained in their writings, there is nothing fundamentally evil about in-app purchases as such. But when they are skillfully used to trick, manipulate and lure gamers into spending money instead of "adding value” to them, the condition becomes something that can be considered questionable. When game developers create and design games with the primary (if not only) purpose of creating a system that lures players to give them money, then most definitely the interests of the players and the developers are not aligned. That cannot last either. So the premise of one of the authors I read was, in effect, that the success of Flappy Bird is a reaction against the games that are designed to manipulate the players and trick them into an addiction where they spend their money. Point well made, although it may or may not be true. The success of Flappy Bird may well be a result of a case of skillful rigging of the App Stores, as has also been suggested.

Be all that as it may, what I have come to see today is a gaming industry with two very different things that both represent a cause for concern, but in very different ways: On one side, we have a crappy game that represents no value at all to its players (Flappy Bird), but yet pulls in $50,000.00 per day in revenue. This is just not right, and should not continue: It is not healthy for an industry to produce revenue for things that are of no value. There is something fundamentally wrong with that, and although I am by no means an economist, I do know that the discrepancy in that is something that is not economically viable in the long run, and is therefore very damaging to the industry (hence the title of my post). But then on the other side, we have the extremely organized, hard working and pedantic game development analysts that tune and tweak and rig the games to appeal to just the right psychological buttons to trick people to pay more money than what they would want to. Now again, there is a fine line between just simply being professional about managing your game and the associated business, and manipulating and tricking your users. But the line does exist. It's really there. And from the looks of it, the gaming industry is now in the process of crossing the line (eg. this), and this cannot last either. In the long run, people will not like being tricked and manipulated.

(To balance off the equation here, I should also mention that game developers also deserve to get paid for their hard work: The point has also been well made that many developers are forced to the free-to-play and in-app-purchase business model because gamers simply do not want to pay for their games anymore. We've gotten so used to everything being "free” that the developers have no choice but to trick us to pay for things in order to bring food to the table. This is yet another unhealthy twist in the equation, and all I can say is how I wish we could all just get along, respect one another, and to treat one another as we would ourselves want to be treated. It's amazing to imagine how complying to such principles would transform even very large things like the worldwide gaming industry.)

Definitely the right path for the gaming industry does not lie with either one of the two "extreme” options above. As game developers, we should seek to make games that bring something good to people. We should make games that people want to play because the game is good and we are making their lives somehow more happy, fun or enjoyable; when we find ourselves developing a game simply for the sake of revenue, and not for the sake of producing a fantastic experience, I think it is time for us to ask ourselves if we're still in check. And lastly: The game development industry today is massive. There are so many people making games, and so many of the games that are being produced are simply remakes of existing ones, with some minor tweaks and enhancements. There is nothing wrong with that, again. It's fantastic for learning, and with little tweaks, an old game can come alive again. But there is also very little value in remaking existing things. The real value is still in creating something that has not been created before. In the development of games that provide a new kind of experience to people, or do so in a way that is different from everything that has been seen before. For game developers, this is summed up in one word that no one understands anymore: INNOVATION. The word has been super-abused. It was actually used in an article about Flappy Bird, which is totally 100% outrageous, and just comes to show what I just said: No one understands the meaning of the word anymore. There's no innovation in Flappy Bird. Seriously, none. There's no innovation in most things. Innovation is something that is new. It's rare. But that's where the value is.

So despite the sad incident of Flappy Bird (for whatever reason it became the hit that it did), I will continue to encourage young (and old) game developers to push the envelope, seek new levels of sophistication in terms of both technical implementation and design of game concepts, graphics, artwork, and gameplay. There are so many things that the gaming industry can produce to make our collective lives more enjoyable. So many cool games that can be made that we have yet to even imagine. But if we regress to the level of Flappy Bird, we will just keep bumping our heads on the ground, repeatedly dying, dying, dying.

Let's make better games. There's still time.