If you didn’t think he’d actually do it, you were wrong.
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 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. 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. 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.
Still, the move to take down the game only increased interest in both
Nguyen and Flappy Bird and the game likely saw a huge spike of downloads after his announcement yesterday. I just wrote a piece about how some saw the move as “Disney-vault like,” creating artificial scarcity to inspire a surge of sales. Nguyen will still be reaping revenue from already downloaded copies, after all.
Some have praised Nguyen for his zen-like attitude toward abandoning a golden goose for the sake of his sanity, but he has likely already raked in millions from the game, and continues to make money from both it and his other popular games which he has not taken down. In other words, it’s not like he gave up his fortune or even his income stream by removing the singular game.
There is still no word from Nguyen directly regarding his promise and follow-through of taking down Flappy Bird. Perhaps if his other games retain a moderate, but not insane level of popularity, that will satisfy him, and we won’t see any more dramatic displays like this one. Still, it only deepens the mystery of a man who would simply erase the most popular game in the world because the reaction to it was bothering him.
I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this, and this is without question one of the most fascinating gaming stories of the year. More information as it develops. [
link]
