“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.