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Madness: Flappy Bird Clones Still Going Strong — Hitting the App Store Every 24 Minutes

2 minute read
Flappy Bird
Hoang Dinh—AFP/Getty Images
By Doug Aamoth

It’s almost as if the idea of spending $99 and three hours to make a game that can pull in $50,000 per day has made app developers everywhere trip over themselves to cobble together slightly-modified versions of the same game, sending them coursing through the Internet’s pipework toward overloaded app stores.

Pocket Gamer took the liberty of trying to figure out just how often these Flappy Bird clones were popping up in Apple’s App Store. The site looked at the previous 300 (not a typo) clones to appear inside the App Store, and once all the numbers were smoothed out, the stats told the tale of one clone being added every 24 minutes. Still. Almost a month after Flappy Bird’s creator killed Flappy Bird.

And if you think developers haven’t been trying their damnedest to differentiate their offerings from other developers, here’s what Pocket Gamer had to say about its methodology:

Our definition of a Flappy Bird clone, by the way, is any game in which you guide some character through an obstacle course of pipes (or similar objects) hanging from the ceiling and sticking out of the ground.

That character could be a bird, a fish, an eagle, a super goat, Nyan Cat, Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Bear Grylls on a jet pack, Flappy Bird inventor Dong Nguyen, the floating head of Kanye West, or the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.

See, if Bear Grylls just kept a jet pack with him all the time, it wouldn’t take him nearly as long to find his way out of remote locales week after week.

A new Flappy Bird clone is added to the iOS App Store every 24 minutes [Pocket Gamer via Joystiq]

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