To get into the top 10 apps list, you almost have to buy fake sales. It's the status quo now.

That said, a lone indie dev from Vietnam could never afford to play that game. It makes much more sense that his game just "went viral".

I know that my partner heard about it via word of mouth, and I heard about it because someone was swearing at their phone in the office lunch room while playing it

It's free, it's extremely simple, and it's fun in the way that games used to be in the 80's and 90's - simple, fair, extremely hard challenges.

The Mario-inspired graphics are nostalgic, the difficulty of the gameplay is nostalgic too. If you're not a "core gamer", so that these things aren't nostalgic for you, then they're novel instead!

Yes I heard about it from my girlfriend (who too was complaining about it), and her best friend too lol.

The success of Minecraft, while awesome, was more accident than anything. Even as a huge fan of Minecraft, the game is buggy and unpolished.

Sometimes a game that lacks balance and/or polish can give very memorable and fun moments to players.

Once something get's a bit of momentum, every you-tuber and blogger has to write about it (coz it's cool). Cool = hits. How it started I don't know, but the online media is responsible for it's continuation. Once something is in the headlines, there are 20,000,000 people that have a social duty to know what it is. Anyway, that's my cynic's perspective. And it cost's nothing to check it out ( I just did ).

Most frustrating game ever, I would say the only reason people are playing it is because it's popular. It also uses Mario graphics, which is the clincher.

Edit : Think of it this way, if the game didn't have advertising, there would be no possibility of saying "Popular mobile game Flappy Bird making $56,000 a day" .. well that would take away well more than half the media attention. Does that mean it's actually the ad at the top of the game screen that's making this game popular. Sure it must have been getting some downloads to start with. But what made it big ? .. The ad !

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2014/02/08/flappy-bird-removed/5315655/

Well, my conjecture is that the developer deliberately made this game with no original mechanics or content whatsoever just to see how popular he could get it to become. And I suspect he's horrified at how well that worked out. There could certainly be something more shady going on, but honestly I can't imagine what.

@cowsarenotevil: A new Cow Clicker?

The game will be removed from the app stored due to numerous death threats sent to the dev(people are getting angry at how hard the game is),he posted that on his twitter.

The game will be removed from the app stored due to numerous death threats sent to the dev(people are getting angry at how hard the game is),he posted that on his twitter.

If I were in his shoes, I'd just buy a castle with all his cash. COME AT ME BRO!

I also think he was one of the few lottery winners on the mobile market. It happens occasionally.

Lucky him.

Maybe next week my number will get picked, although I think my odds are better with Powerball. :-)

I don't want to play into the debate whether the game is good or not, or whether it's just another clone.

I find it hilarious that people assume the game must've gone viral because it had some "popular" element or there had to be fraudulent paid clicks.

Sometimes machine errors happens: An integer overflow, memory corruption, a race condition. All of them can also explain how an app can go from the bottom of a list to the top; giving a visibility other obscure games can't enjoy.

The odds of a bug like this is extremely rare, but everyone is assuming this game had 0.001% chance of succeeding anyway, so this explanation is as reasonable as all others.

Compare it to winning the lottery. The guy made a lot of money. Probably your game is better. This happens all the time. Deal with it.

Sounds much like Angry Birds, which was recently revealed (or alleged) to be an espionage tool of US agencies. This one is probably an espionage tool for the Chinese agencies.