1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it as a hilarious account of mass-produced app store shovelware and cite it in threads on spam and low-quality content.
What it is
In this 2019 GDC talk, Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott explain how they flooded the app stores with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games to find the lowest bar for success. They tour the dark side of the mobile app market.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2020 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec cyber_kinetist · 2022-07 · on “Unity merges with IronSource”
There was a GDC talk telling a a story where two bored indie game devs made an AI that churns out throwaway low-quality slot machine games as a joke, but actually earned much more money they they’ve expected (thousands of dollars per day). They jokingly told that the reason for high CPU numbers was their “anti-retention” model, where people get so bored by their game that they would literally click ads to escape into another game! That talk was hilarious, here’s the link: [this video]
Recommends jordanwallwork · 2020-09 · on “Google requiring Android apps on Play store to use its billing system next year”
Reminds me of this brilliant GDC Talk - 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality [this video]
Recommends chaorace · 2021-01 · on “A bit on scaling chess.com's database”
If you think that's bad, check out this GDC Talk: [this video] They procedurally generated 1,500+ different iterations on top of the same Unity-based slots shovelware using noun/adjective pairs. The general success they enjoyed is as sad as it is hilarious . For the record, the most enticing descriptor categories were: "3D", "Luxury", "Casino/Gambling", and "Sexy".
Cites BbzzbB · 2022-02 · on “Study: Effectiveness of Apple's app tracking transparency”
Sorry I was just being snarky with the trash app mentioned, I could've done without it I just had a talk [0, fun one] in the back of my head when writing. There must indeed be hundreds (dozens?) of companies which fall in a grey area that Apple wouldn't be inclined to ban straight up at first offense. 0: [this video]
Cites XCSme · 2022-05 · on “Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots”
If the internet is dead, is there anything left that's "alive"? The mobile app stores are also filled with crap[0] and it seems that the ratio of spam content vs real content is getting close to infinity. [0]: [this video] - 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality
Cites refactor_master · 2026-02 · on “Stop Thinking of AI as a Coworker. It's an Exoskeleton”
Here’s a talk about leaning into the garbage flow. And that was a decade ago. [this video] I can’t imagine the number being economically meaningful now.