Little Flappy Bird vs. giant Zynga Dog!

Our MBA class just has come back from a great MBA International trip, “Doing Business in Emerging Market – China 2014”. In Beijing, we had an exciting morning visiting Zynga Inc., a giant social game company named in honor of Zynga, former CEO Mark Pincus’ late American bulldog, which transformed hundreds of millions of office people around the world to genuine farmers through a social game, Farmville and other popular games on Facebook such as Mafia Wars and Zynga poker.

UCD China 2014 – Doing Business in Emerging Market.

Recently, a tiny game – Flappy Bird – developed by the Vietnam-based developer Nguyen Ha Dong, became the special phenomenon in tech world when it climbed to the top 1st free application on both Google Android and Apple Store, a dream of even many giant technology companies which paid millions US dollars for marketing campaigns to get the top position in both Operating Systems (the author who writes this blog is also proud of being a Vietnamese guy who studies at the same technology university with Dong). While many people doubted that the top indie game Flappy Bird on Android and iOS Store can earn $ 50,000 a day, many top games have reached revenue of $ 1 billion. For example, the game Farmville has reached a revenue of $ 1 billion since early 2013 or the recent game, Clash of Clans, generates $ 2.4 million per day from Supercell Studio, a two-year-old start-up game company of Finland with only 95 members. It is quite normal in “the flat world”, a metaphor by Thomas L. Friedman in term of commerce for viewing the world as a place where all competitors have an equal opportunity. I believe that the metaphor is totally right for the mobile market where many developers have an equal chance to be successful from over the world even they are giant technology companies or dependent developers.

Flappy Bird vs. Zynga

During the meeting with the executive managers at Zynga, Flappy Bird story has been referred by my Indian classmate when he asked whether Zynga planned to make some tiny games like Flappy Bird. There are also some questions about ethical issues, i.e., many young people get addicted to the game, leading malnourished and neurological problems. The philosophical answer of the manager in Zynga quite met my moral perspective: “The addiction can happen to any field such as workaholic, alcoholic, Facebook-addicted etc… And individuals have a complete responsibility for their own actions but game developers should also limit time to play game”. Playing game in moderation is good for entertaining and socializing as Zynga stated their mission is “Connecting the World through Games”.

Coming back to the 5-star hotel, New Otani Chang Fu Gong and researching more about Zynga and Pincus, I opened my Google Market Store on my Android Phone and saw that some games from my classmate’s start-up game studio (not Ha Dong) had reached 1 million downloads. It’s amazing! Can it be a second Flappy bird earning $50.000 a day? Standing up to open the window and seeing “the emerging market” outside, I exclaimed: “I have found China and Friedman is right. The world is flat!!!”