High Demand for Flappy Bird
Written by: Carter Allen
High Demand for Flappy Bird
All it took was a few weeks for the mobile game ‘Flappy Bird’ to take over the app stores on almost all devices. This free and addictive game involves a bird that the player controls and makes fly through metal pipes that serve as difficult obstacles. The frustrating and everlasting game took over the app market place in what seemed over night. The rapid rise in popularity caused a global bandwagon effect and the demand for the game skyrocketed. However, the rapid rise was accompanied by an equally unanticipated fall when the creator, Dong Nguyen, took the game down in early February of this year.
Nguyen shut the game down simply due to its addictive nature along with the stress he was experiencing; but was the opportunity cost of deleting the app to save stress worth losing all the money made each day from advertising? Nguyen believes it was, as he announced to the public, “it is an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. The game is gone forever” (Shoichet). What was a shock to many were the negative externalities the difficulty the game caused. From time lost to fights with family and friends even to “marriages ended” (Shoichet) there were endless amounts of complaints. Perhaps the deletion of this game has brought these people peace, but many are outraged as they can no longer participate in the latest fad. The app store does still provide many available substitutes, but in most cases consumer preferencewas too high for this game to be replaced.
With Flappy Bird being removed from the market, the marketresponded with an even greater demandfor this private good. The consumers who had already downloaded the game before its removal were able to keep it on their mobile devices, but as of now the game is not downloadable. In turn, this has increased the value of smartphones and other devices with Flappy Bird installed on their hard drive. As you can see in the visual below, in some cases on eBay the value of a phone with the game installed has more than tripled its value. Select Samsung Galaxy 4 and iPod devices have reached the one thousand dollar mark.
Some believed that Nguyen should continue the game, but set in a dollar fee to it. At its best, I believe this game was rather inelastic; it was so exceptionally popular and addicting that the dollar fee would have had little influence on the number of downloads. In a particular two-week time span Flappy Bird was downloaded over fifty million times (“Game Over”). The amount of revenue Nguyen could have made off this would have been substantial along with the money made off of advertisements.
At its peak, Flappy Bird was making Nguyen over $50,000 simply in advertisements each day. For a game he created in “two to three days” (Shoichet) this marginal benefit of money made off advertising far outweighs the marginal cost of making it. This game was a great achievement and asset of Nguyen’s and there has even been talk of him releasing it back to the public. Overall, his sudden stop of supplystunned the market and it will be interesting to watch if the global phenomenon makes a second appearance in app stores everywhere.
This YouTube video serves as a great overview of the economics of Flappy Bird:
Works Cited
“Game Over.” The Economist. The Economist Newspaper Limited, 2014. Web. 17 March. 2014.
Norman, Alex. “The Curious Case of Disappearing Flappy Birds.” Medill Reports Chicago. Medill Reports – Chicago, Northwestern University, 2001-2014. Web. 17 March. 2014.
Phillips, Jack. “Flappy Bird: Developer Dong Nguyen Mulling Bringing Addicting Game Back.” The Epoch Times. Epoch Times, 2000-2014. Web. 17 March. 2014.
Shoichet, Catherine E. “Developer yanks ‘Flappy Bird’ after game soars to success.” CNN. Cable News Network, 2014. Web. 17 March. 2014.
“28 Days of Fame: The Strange, True Story of ‘Flappy Bird’.” Mashable. Mashable, 2014. Web. 17 March. 2014.
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