As the commenter you are responding to mentioned, the hit-box is much larger than the bird.
If your hit-boxes aren't the same size as your sprites, players are frequently going to die when they didn't even appear to hit the pipes. So no, it isn't always the user's fault.
I found the hitbox so frustrating I took an airplay video of several games and was surprised when instant replay showed a 1 pixel collision between the bird and the pipe, when I thought I was clear.
The conspiracist in me wanted to believe the pipes had additional gravity or something that caused me to hit, but practically speaking I wonder if we're simply used to games making hitboxes smaller than the avatar. I certainly noticed that in Jetpack Joyride.
> I wonder if we're simply used to games making hitboxes smaller than the avatar.
Yes, it's an often-used trick to enhance the feel of gameplay. Generally you want to make the hitbox of the player, and of the "bad" things smaller, and the hitbox of "good" things (items etc) larger.
This is all (just one) part of the philosophy that the game should behave as the player intends to control it, which is not always equivalent with the literal interpretation of how the player controls it.
Another example is jumping in platform games, if you walk off the edge of a platform, many games will give you a few frames of leeway in which you can still jump, even if the character is actually in mid-air. (alternatively a game can make the platforms' hitbox slightly larger than they appear, but in my experience the leeway approach makes for smoother gameplay)
All of these tricks basically make a game easier to play, but in a way that feels very satisfactory to the player. The idea being, you can always make up for the level of difficulty by making the levels harder, the enemies faster, etc. This shifts the balance from hardness by frustration to challenge.
The fact that Flappy Bird obviously subverts this philosophy, I think is part of its wtf-intrigue. Whether the author of the game did it on purpose or not, is another question.
This is an issue of lack of telegraphing (non-verbal queue/instruction/feedback) the area around the bird that will cause the player to fail. To get "good" at flappy bird the player has to build their own mental model around the bird that represents failure. (In the actual version of the game not this MMO version which has a nice little white bubble)
