Game Fads Sustainability
Discussions focus on whether viral games like Flappy Bird, Angry Birds, Pokemon Go, and others are fleeting fads or sustainable businesses, debating factors like luck, monetization, market saturation, and hit-driven nature of gaming.
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The real issue is whether this is a fad or not (i.e. if only hardcore Pokemon fans are left playing in a month).If it's not a fad, this is a good idea monetization wise.If it is a fad, this will alienate the fans, and the game will fade into obscurity (e.g. Draw Something, QuizUp, etc).
I see lot of f2p games success stories
This game is a passing fad, not a sustainable business.Most current users will get bored and move on to something else.Most of the worth is probably in people that can put up a successful product.
I'm no economist, and I didn't want to imply efficient market. More of a guesswork: there are a lot of those games out, some successful, some failed. They usually require quite some involvement to play at good level so I suppose people don't really jump to a new game immediately. They take a ton of time to develop and if they were more popular, I'm quite sure there would be more of them. Contrast this with for example the RTS genre, which is practically extinct.
The most direct example of this to me is in video games, there are 10s of thousands of failed games with amazing art and coding behind them, but then weekend projects like Flappy bird, Vampire Survivors and Wordle make it big. They just were lucky enough to find the right angle, a team of 100 PHDs working 10X as long would find less success.
One game always rises to the top for a few years. Minecraft was the previous one. I think it also has a lot to do with luck, people love to read too much into a single success story and try to replicate it (cargo culting). Most fail.
Why this game has become popular all of a sudden?
That's silly, good and popular games rise to the top despite the platform or competition.Angry Birds, Minecraft, etc. were all released in saturated markets yet they still became super popular.
Realistically, this thing is going to live and die based on 1) how good these games are and 2) who gets in on the initial batchif the right people get their hands on these (i'm thinking influencers, game critics, but the kind of people who are receptive to new ideas and) and the games are worth playing, it could become a must-have item.If either of these fail, it will fall into relative obscurity, as these products usually do
Speculation: because the only way he could make these games "wildly downloaded" is a massive advertising spend. If the games can't actually maintain a userbase on their own, they might not be worth anything.