[michaelone]

Outliers is a fun book about this type of stuff. It's not that the creator "hacked" the system for Flappy Bird -- all signs point to him being a super authentic game designer who just made his game, and for lack of a better word "lucked" into all the right circumstances. However, it's still interesting to try to determine which factors played a role in something that clearly had such a non-standard trajectory. Everything that goes "viral" has to have some catalyst that created the opportunity to go viral. Nobody knew about Flappy Bird in May, hence it could not go viral. Something changed in December and that is what is so fascinating.