“If you didn’t think he’d actually do it, you were wrong,” Paul Tassi reports for Forbes. “Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen followed through with his promise to remove the game from app stores, and as his 22 hour deadline passed, the game was indeed taken down from Apple’s iOS [App Store] and the Android/Google Play marketplace”
“I’ll admit, I was skeptical this deadline would be met, but apparently he set the wheels in motion, and never looked back. There are still no updates from Nguyen on Twitter since his string of messages yesterday saying that he ‘couldn’t take’ the attention and infamy from Flappy Bird, and he was taking the game down,” Tassi reports. “He also said he wasn’t going to sell it, and that ‘he still makes games.’ Indeed Nguyen still has several other top app store games including Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block which are currently #4 and #18 on the iOS store respectively.”
“Nguyen claimed that Flappy Bird had “ruined his simple life” by attracting too much attention from a critical games press or unpleasant players,” Tassi reports. “The app was said to be bringing in $50,000 a day in revenue, making Nguyen’s promise to remove it hard to believe, but he has.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Two possibilities:
• It’s true and Nguyen just wants to be free of the awful burden of raking in US$50,000 per day; or
• It’s a PR stunt and the game will be reappear or be used in some fashion in the future when Nguyen deems the time is right.
DaFuq is wrong with him???
He should just make the game free! He wouldn’t even need to support it, Problem Solved.
It was free. It was ad supported. What he didn’t like was the fame, notoriety and attention.
Yer right!
I don’t believe a word of that.
The game is free. The 50k/day was ad revenue.
Oh. Well, that should still come in, right? I mean, all the existing downloads of the game should still be out there, serving up ads.
——RM
Oh, the humanity!
To some people, there are more important things than money.
Such as not receiving hate mail and death threats because you designed some stupid game.
I doubt he was receiving hate mail and death threats and if you don’t want the noise that goes with success, turn the ringer off on the phone, stay off twitter, get a private email for business, and for one day’s take on that game you can hire someone to filter it all. If you don’t want the money, for one day’s worth you can feed entire populations on this planet for years.
I agree with MDM, this is very fishy.
“I doubt he was receiving hate mail and death threats” – really? In an age where someone campaigning to get a woman’s face on the back of a banknote can receive threats of violence and death from other women, it seems very likely he was to me…
If you’re even suspected of gaming the system, the fallout can really burn.
http://www.newsweek.com/flappy-bird-cooking-its-itunes-rank-228016
You think he took it down because of this kind of stuff? As he he really was gaming the system? Bummer. Kinda spoils it.
There are a couple of angles to the story. One developer blogged his suspicions about Nguyen who had not just one but three unlinked apps peaking in the charts at the same time. The Telegraph picked up the story and it spread to Newsweek, freaking out a lot of people who were already nuts because the game was so hard, going viral with PewDiePie getting nine million views on YouTube.
I’m not suggesting Nguyen is guilty. I’m saying that if enough people believe it, they can get nasty, and that could drive anyone into seclusion.
That Newsweek article is more a symptom of the way “news” reporting is going, rather than a scathing review of flappy bird. Look at the “source” Newsweek credits. Bluecloud Solutions. An App Skinner. He doesn’t make shit himself, he takes other peoples apps and slaps new paint on them, throws them on the app store for a month, rinse wash repeat. The guy is f’ing trash. And he is Newsweek’s “credible” source? His entire blog post reeks of jealousy, without one fact to back his claim up.
I can guarantee a Bluecloud Flapping Bird, Flopping Bird and Flipping Bird are all in the works from this hack.
We see this kind of “reporting” time and time again on MDN, it’s just one more in a long line of hit whores. You can’t believe that Newsweek, or NYT, or Bloomberg would stoop so low, so it must be true. And in this case it directly affects someone’s life. And the rest of the internet is quick to pile on, without any fact checking.
But that’s just one part of the article. It also points out how the game dropped into obscurity after release, only to skyrocket to #1 months later with no explanation. It also points out the suspiciously similar wording of the 5-star reviews of the app.
——RM
All it takes is a few famous youtube celebs to play your game, and the game skyrockets. Look at Backflip Madness… another game that had very little going for it other than it was a one button interface, easy to learn, stupid hard to master. Pewdiepie plays it and it’s number one overnight. These things happen all the time on the app store. The difference here is they don’t have the lasting power flappy bird has shown. That can’t be from faking reviews or buying downloads. Pewdiepie played flappy bird. It got to number one. hardly a coincidence.
I read a ton of the fb reviews – some of them are hilarious. The article says “look at all these 5 star reviews I found with negative words in them”. The negative words are things like “this game should rot in hell”, then the next line is “but I can’t put it down”. People started writing those long reviews tongue in cheek, others followed and copied. Everything about the Newsweek article, and the original blog is total shit reporting.
…and just to back up my thoughts with actual *gasp* facts…
http://www.thechocolatelabapps.com/is-twitter-the-fuel-behind-the-success-of-the-1-app-flappy-bird/
The reviews were just as big a competition as the high scores.
Flappy bird creator causing a PR flap….that’s all!
His intentions are clear and transparent as Apples future sapphire glass. All he is trying to do is play hard to get.
If I recall, this guy has been caught red-handed multi-FAKING 5-star reviews of his games on many occasions, a la the strategy of that horror of scamware, MacKeeper. Please correct me if I have confused him with another Dong Nguyen.
So here is a big sobbing boohoo for Dong:
😥 (;_;) 😥 (;_;) 😛
Hey, I kept getting pop-unders of that MacKeeper last night while I was surfing for po …. educational content. I really enjoy being educated, but I can only take ten minutes at a time.
Sometimes I’m tempted to become a hacker in order to hack-back the scammers on the Internet. It would be similar to the hate-back crap I post around here at the haters/trolls/waste cases. My first target: MacKeeper. Every website knowingly serving their ad scams would be brought down to their knees. The MacKeeper website itself (which has been known to be a changing target) would be wiped and forwarded to the worst website winning in a rolling survey of Mac Internet users.
(I’m eating dinner, so will forgo suggesting a web page).
Meh… Big deal! He’s obviously a total loser, or else he would have understood that he could have takend all the money he was making off of the ads, and hired someone else to deal with the horrible pressure of his success. I have no sympathy for this guy. One more thing… The pipes that the bird flies between look suspiciously like the same ones that Mario encountered in Super Mario World. Coincidence? I think not. That may well be the reason why the game got taken down. Perhaps someone at Nintendo didn’t appreciate how similar Flappy Bird looked to their intellectual property.
He’s the one.
It just means it’s not available to download anymore. But people can still play and he will still earn his $50k a day!
This sounds like the makings of a PR stunt. In a few days, a new version of Flappy Birds will come out, with new levels and more characters. But then…it will end up like the Sonic franchise. I can’t wait for “Flappy Bird Adventure”.
The fact that he gave a countdown (22 hour deadline) I have to say – yea, it’s a PR stunt.
Yep!
$50K/day, 30 days, carry the five, $1.5M. It reminds of the Futurama episode when Bender thought he had stolen enough and Fry slaps him out of it. Something smells fishy to me, I think I could live with the fame for $1.5M a month, hell, he still is.
the game was a scam to generate ad clicks – it’s almost unplayable – and every time you fail it shows an ad – scammer – got nervous and ran with the $’s
I deleted the app because it was stupid hard.
As the ads on this site attest – MDN can not comprehend any action or decision that is not driven by dollar figures.
Funny how it just got an update on the 8th. My high score is 43, and my 11 year old son’s is 58 :/. Maybe he took it down because the high scores in the leaderboard have been hacked. There is a bunch of 9,999…really?
So why did he actually take it down?
My kids layer that game as as soon as I saw it I thought it was super mario.
It has the same style graphics. I wonder if Nintendo got him to pull the plug or be sued…
With “$50,000 a day in revenue”, how many days would it take to equip every student with an iPad in the county he lives in? In the state he lives in? In the country? Perhaps, if he selected a cause to dump his cash into, he could have made a difference.
So, now that the money is moving on to the next game company, will they too take the high road or donate the cash or enrich them selves for the efforts they invested into that next game.
Did he really believe that the gamers will move on to something more beneficial or spiritual? I hope he got the results he was hoping for what ever it is.