ringgit.me

As an avid gamer for 3 decades, I have always dreamed of making games. Back in the 1988, my friend and I wanted to make a game. We built a website in anticipate to promote the game (that was before blogs were popular) but we didn't really have the energy, passion and technical know how to write a game. At one point, 2 years after iPhone was released and many people are making money writing apps, we wanted to tap on that platform to write games. I bought a Mac with the main intention of studying iOS programming. Last year Dec, we even planned to take a week off and take a iOS programming course. So, it is with envy that I see successes of Flappy Bird, a game so simple, it boggles the mind on how it became so popular. And the natural thoughts of the developer quitting despite potentially making US$50,000/day is that he must be insane.. or weak. If I had $50K a day, I would shut off internet and go to the beach sipping premium coffee.. or I would buy a bungalow in Cameron Highlands ...

Over the past two months, a phenomenon happened in the mobile app world. A game came out of nowhere and took the world by storm (it has 50 million downloads and there are 16 million tweets about it!). And it is not a AAA game. It is made by one person, one developer from Vietnam. The game is called Flappy Bird. This is a very simple game but it was very addictive - because of its simplicity and yet difficult to play, it became the game people are obsessed to beat, or be better than their friends. Many people have a love-hate relationship with it. They hated the game but they can't do without it. That sounds like drug - could this be the formula to build a mobile app? The developer told  TechCrunch in an interview: "I don't know how my games can be so popular. Most of my players are kids in schools. I would like to thanks them for playing my game and sharing it to other people." This is the issue with mobile games these days - so many of these addictive games are...