The Curious Case Of Flappy Bird

An emotional game developer pulls his creation from extremely lucrative store shelves, leaving the world a-puzzled.

The story of a simple 2D game with basic graphics rising to the top of the App Stores across two of the world’s biggest OS’, and then their creator being overwhelmed by the attention to the point of removing the game altogether, is a fascinating, if not intriguing one.

Developer Dong Nguyen is being touted as a simple man who develops games for the love of it, while some believe that he is a shrewd marketer in the making.

So what happened?

Let us take you through the roller coaster ride of “Flappy Bird”.

Dong Nguyen, based out of Vietnam released the “Flappy Bird” on Apple’s App Store on 24th May 2013, and targeted it specially for iPhone 5. The game was then optimised for all devices running iOS7, in September 2013.

Once it gained popularity on Apple’s App Store, it was released on Google’s Play store on 30th January 2014.

The game witnessed a meteoric rise, becoming one of the top few apps across both stores.

Then, on February 8th, Dong suddenly tweeted that he was pulling the game down — which he did less than 24 hours later.

Flappy Bird was a simple game, which vaguely resembled “Mario Bros” in it’s game interface.
I remember playing a similar game on my notebook 3–4 years ago, where the player had to guide a helicopter across a maze.

The game was broken into different stages, where the click of the mouse would make the helicopter climb while no action would gradually bring the helicopter down; so the concept for the game is not new, however in the age of complex games it’s simplicity was a welcome change.

We can see the same phenomenon at work in “Angry Birds” and “Candy Crush”, where the player does not feel overwhelmed by to the complexity of the game or it’s graphics or several controls to manage. The joy is but to enjoy the game itself.

This very simplicity of the Flappy Bird became the reason for its demise.

In an interview to the Forbes, Dong Nguyen, said that the game was created to help people to entertain themselves for a few minutes so as to unwind. However, when the game turned out to be addictive, it became a cause of concern to Nguyen, leading to his decision to take the game down from both the app stores.

He has refuted the rumours of Nintendo having sent him a legal notice (which was a talking point in many of the articles conjecturing this curious turn of events).

Despite Nguyen’s statement, it is very perplexing for users to understand why he took such a decision. Are there more factors involved for him to take such a stance? What is boggling most people is how could he walk away from revenue of USD 50,000 a day, and whether he still earns the same amount from the existing users who already have the game on their phones.

In his tweets he has clarified that he remains a games developer and also retains his other games on the app stores.

Existing phones with the game loaded are now being sold and traded across geographies, even on eBay! The phones are openly promoted as coming with the Flappy Bird app installed; we’d recommend caution though, as ebay.com’s policy is to wipe down each phone and factory-reset it before sending it to the new owners.

It is worthwhile to note that many other games based on similar concepts have already mushroomed in both the App Stores — there are now ducks, helicopters, fish, etc. mimicking the Bird. Let’s see if any of them gains the cult following that “Flappy Bird” did?

Originally published at Chip-Monks.