The first attempt resulted in a score of 0—this was the first time Brian Cooper had ever encountered such a situation.

After the little bird died, a Game Over screen popped up, displaying both the current score and the best score, both of which were 0. However, below the score there was also a ranking, showing Brian Cooper's current rank as “--”, clearly indicating that the score was too low to be included in the rankings.

In addition, Brian Cooper noticed that at the top of this screen, occupying a quarter of the display, there was a blank area with three characters written on it: “广告位” (“Ad Space”).

Brian Cooper nodded. These three characters made him slightly revise his impression of this No. 7 designer.

Brian Cooper is the founder of Hengyou Network and has always been active on the front lines of game development, so he pays special attention to a game’s monetization model and profitability.

Many novice designers have a common flaw: when designing a game, they don’t consider how it will make money.

In fact, what the best monetization method for a game is should be something the designer figures out from the very beginning.

For this kind of casual mini-game, should it be pay-to-download? Or should it have built-in ads? Different monetization strategies have a big impact on the game itself.

The fact that this designer knew to leave an “ad space” here shows that he’s aware of this, which already makes him much better than those designers who stubbornly get stuck on trivial details.

Clicking the screen again, the game started once more.

This time, Brian Cooper was prepared, tapping the screen continuously, but the flight path of this dumb bird was just too hard to control. Brian Cooper barely managed to get past two pipes before crashing headfirst into the third.

“Damn it!”

Brian Cooper was not convinced—he had to try again.

Five minutes later, Brian Cooper had already died dozens of times.

There was no helping it; this game was just too easy to die in. Even if you played with full concentration, it was still very likely to crash within three or four seconds.

And after dying, you just tap once to restart—there’s no need to even think about it. Before you know it, you’ve played a ton of rounds.

Brian Cooper’s best score was 12, and that was only achieved by giving it everything he had.

After another dozen or so tries, Brian Cooper finally managed to push his score up to 14, and he felt a bit dazed.

However, Brian Cooper noticed that on the game over screen, his ranking had suddenly become 6th place.

Brian Cooper tried tapping it and found that a leaderboard popped up, ranking scores from high to low.

Of course, the names on the leaderboard were all in the format of GuestXXXX. After all, Adam Brooks couldn’t possibly require every player to enter a username at the start—that would really hurt the game experience.

However, on the leaderboard screen, you could freely change your name.

Brian Cooper scrolled down and was shocked to find that there were actually 543 people on the entire leaderboard!

There were only 700 players in total, and over 500 had played this mini-game? That’s insane! How could that be possible?

Brian Cooper had originally thought that most people wouldn’t be interested in this game, but it turned out that way more people liked this quirky game than he had imagined.

Brian Cooper couldn’t help but feel a little proud—ranking 6th out of over 500 people was definitely something to brag about!

Brian Cooper clicked on his username and changed it to his real name.

He scrolled down first and noticed that the leaderboard was constantly changing, refreshing every five to ten seconds or so—pretty frequently.

Watching the names on the leaderboard go up and down, Brian Cooper really got a sense that “this game is lively.”

Scrolling back up, Brian Cooper was stunned—the top score on the leaderboard was an astonishing 47!

Damn!

Brian Cooper almost wanted to die. How was that even possible? How could someone get 47 points in such a brutal game? They must be cheating!

The top few players hadn’t changed their names yet—probably hadn’t discovered that feature.

Brian Cooper was clearly not satisfied, especially since he only had 14 points and was just temporarily in 6th place—he could be overtaken at any moment.

“Five more minutes, then I’ll go try out the other games.”

Brian Cooper closed the leaderboard and dove back into the game.

……

Soon, ten minutes had passed, and the effect of the Super Focuser ended.

“What a ridiculous game… I actually played it for this long, damn.”

A middle-aged man with glasses exited 《FlappyBird》, and a prompt popped up on the screen: “Would you like to recommend this game to others?”

The middle-aged man hesitated for a moment, then clicked “Recommend.”

He couldn’t really say why—maybe it was just the feeling of “I can’t be the only one suffering.”

By now, the leaderboard on 《FlappyBird》had reached 589 people, and the number was still rising.

This was because people tend to follow the crowd. Some of the audience members knew each other privately and were competing to see who could get the higher score; plus, the audience could see each other’s screens, so after seeing so many people playing this bird game, even some who hadn’t been affected by the Super Focuser were drawn in.

After the Super Focuser wore off, more than half the players quit the game, but only a small portion chose “Do Not Recommend”—the rest all chose “Recommend.”