Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen made good on his promise to resurrect Flappy Bird this month after previously deleting the #1 app at the peak of its popularity this past February. It's an entirely new game this time around, not a simple reinstatement of the old one. But right now, "Flappy Birds Family" is only available on Amazon's Android app store, and hasn't made its way to Google Play or Apple's iOS market yet.
Here's the official description that lays out what's been changed in the "Family" upgrade:
"Flappy Birds now are on Amazon Fire TV with incredible new features: Person vs Person mode, more obstacles, more fun and still very hard. Enjoy playing the game at home (not breaking your TV) with your family and friends."
If this isn't some exclusive deal Nguyen struck with Amazon, presumably the game will expand past this single market soon, but the question is, will it climb back up the other charts again, to reclaim its former throne?
It's hard to say, as the app market is notoriously fickle. Yes, that means I can't really predict that players will certainly reject the return of the game, but looking over the charts now, it seems the age of the "tap to avoid obstacles" genre is over.
At the height of the Flappy Bird craze, a solid 20 or so of the top 100 apps in Apple's iOS store were Flappy Bird clones, and that remained true even after the original came down. Almost as soon as it did, "Splashy Fish" was the one that rose higher than all the rest, with 5 to 10 million daily players, and 250 million games being played per day. For as much as the public liked Flappy Bird itself, they liked the mechanic more than the IP, and they were perfectly content to replace it with any number of identical copies practically the second it went down.
That's why I'm not sure if Flappy Birds Family will make much of an impact on the market, if it isn't locked into an Amazon-only deal. It's kind of like expecting Vanilla Ice to shoot up the charts by releasing a remix of his one-hit wonder. It's possible, but just unlikely.
To the app market's credit, it finally seems to have settled into a place where there's no one dominant game type that's being cloned endlessly and taking up a solid chunk of the charts. It's a pretty diverse mix of games at this point, with the new talk of the town being Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the absurdly successful celebrity ladder-climbing game that was number one for a time (now #5 on Apple) and reportedly made Glu Mobile $200M in about a month, with Kardashian herself netting $85M of that through a lucrative arrangement with the publisher.
For as much press as that game's gotten recently, if there's anything else about to be cloned to all hell, it's probably KK:H. But with that said, for all its absurdity, Kardashian's game is infinitely more complex than Flappy Bird, and no one is going to be able to rip it off in a manner of days or hours like what happened with Dong Nguyen's original. Clones of Flappy Bird ran rampant because the game was so easy to reproduce. Not so with Kim Kardashian: Hollwood, where in terms of mechanical complexity, Flappy Bird makes it look like Dark Souls. It's just going to be a lot more work to steal.
It's going to be a curious experiment to see if the public's attention span can snap back to something that was insanely popular just six months ago. It's the same game with a few more features, and if they loved it then, they should love it now, right? Perhaps, but that's hardly a sure thing, and the average app downloader has a shorter memory and less loyalty than most.
It remains to be seen what other platforms Flappy Birds Family with fly to, but for now, get it on Amazon.
