Social Point's Flying Dog Gets by on Bare Bones Gameplay

Flying Dog is an arcade style game from Social Empires developer Social Point. Following a $3.4 million round of funding raised by the Barcelona-based studio, the game saw an uptake in both daily and monthly active users that has it on track to reach or exceed its all-time high. According to our traffic tracking service AppData, Flying Dog currently has 734,083 monthly active users and 47,787 daily active users. In Flying Dog, the player uses an elephant’s trunk to fling the titular Dog skyward in effort to fly as far as possible. This feat is performed by “grabbing” the trunk using the mouse and quickly swiping, releasing the mouse button to set the dog’s launch angle. Based on the dog’s momentum and angle when it lands, it’ll bounce back up into the air until finally running out of speed. Colorful frogs appear randomly and, if hit, serve to spring the dog further into the air than simply hitting the ground would. Four power-ups are also available: a reactor, which makes the dog fly farther; wings, which make him fall more slowly; rockets, which initially send him flying higher; and snakes, which take the place of -- and are bouncier than -- frogs. The game seeks to incentivize players by rewarding them with free items for Liking the game and inviting friends. Flying Dog also has a leaderboard for comparing your score against friends also playing the game. Social Point monetizes the game through the direct purchase of the aforementioned power-ups using PayPal and credit cards as funding sources, which isn’t in line with Facebook’s requirement that all games use Facebook Credits for payment. In fact, we don't see any Facebook Credits options at all in Flying Dog's payment options -- although Social Point's Social Empires monetizes through Facebook Credits. The company had not responded to our request for comment on this by post time, so we're not sure if Flying Dog will see any sort of content updates. We observe that the game’s Wall is a collection of messages encouraging visitors to play the game mixed with a copious amount of spam comments. Even so, the simple mechanics clearly have enough appeal to maintain over 40,000 DAU for almost an entire month. Similar games, like Apollo 69, haven't been able to retain half as many users. You can follow The Flying Dog’s progress using AppData, our traffic tracking application for social games and developers.

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Social Point's Flying Dog Gets by on Bare Bones Gameplay

Randy Nelson

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Randy Nelson