There's a good chance you've either played flappy bird or at least you've
heard of it it's easy to play you simply tap the screen to make the bird fly and
avoid obstacles you get points for successfully avoiding the pipes but if
you hit them or crash into the ground the game is over.
Flappy bird was highly addictive so much so that it ruined the life of the
guy who created i. At one point, Dong Nguyen was making $50,000
a day on the game from ads yet he removed it from the App Store and Google
Play less than a year after its release. Why did he walk away from what appeared
to be such a success? Our story begins in Hanoi, Vietnam in
2013. Dong Nguyen was a 28-year-old programmer who lived with his parents. He
made a living programming location devices for taxis. As a teen, he was
obsessed with video games like Super Mario Bros and also learned to code. He
played the app Angry Birds but thought it was too busy, there was too much going
on. That inspired him to make Flappy Bird over one weekend. He wanted to make
something simpler that you could play while on the go. His company .Gears
released the game on the App Store on May 24, 2013. It went live on Google Play
in early 2014. he decided the game would be free he hoped to make a few hundred
bucks a month from the ads within the game but little did he know the fortune
that lay ahead. Initially, Flappy Bird didn't attract
much attention. Tens of thousands of new apps come online every month. Competition
was tough. However, about eight months after
releasing the game something strange happened. People started talking about it.
Really talking about it. How they were addicted to it. How they were frustrated
by it. How they couldn't stop cursing after losing.
Flappy Bird adhered to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell's principle: the belief
that all the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.
Whenever you played, you felt like you could have done better and that made you
want to try again and again. The game was all about skill.
Most people usually lost within the first 10 pipes or so - you got a point for
every gap you passed through. If you got 10 or more points you did exceptionally
well. The physics was especially impressive
Flappy Bird was inspired by the act of bouncing a ping-pong ball against a
paddle for as long as possible. Whenever flappy nose-dived, you felt you were
along for the ride. Whenever flappy died it wasn't so much that flappy died but
you died. By January 2014, the game topped the charts. It was the most downloaded
app in several countries including the U.S. It helped that PewDiePie reviewed it
on his YouTube channel. There we go baby here we go.
Why is it so hard? By February 2014, Flappy Bird had been
downloaded more than 50 million times netting Nguyen $50,000 a day in ad
revenue. You'd think he'd be the happiest man in the world
but no. On February 8, 2014 he tweeted that
Flappy Bird was ruining his simple life and that he grew to hate his own game.
The following day (local time) he tweeted: I am sorry Flappy Bird users. 22 hours from now I
will take Flappy Bird down. I cannot take this anymore.
This came as a shock. Why on earth would anyone remove a game
that was so insanely popular generating $50,000 a day even after Apple and
Google's 30 per cent cut of the revenue? Instead of being thrilled about his
success, he was very very unhappy. In an interview with Rolling Stone a
month after taking the app offline, he said he found the sudden intention
suffocating. He said his parents didn't know about the game until the paparazzi
showed up outside his door. When journalists started reaching out to
him for interviews he pleaded with them to "give him peace".
Even worse than the media attention was the criticism from some users. He had
intended for the game to be played for just a few minutes at a time as a
relaxing break but in reality, that's not how people use the app. They were
addicted. He showed Rolling Stone a message he
received from a woman who chastised him for "distracting the children of the
world." Another person wrote: "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of
your game and they still play it because it's addicting like crack." Nguyen
apparently took these messages to heart: "...at first I thought they were just
joking but I realize they really hurt themselves. In an interview with Forbes
shortly after taking the game down, he explained it happened to become an
addictive product: "I think it has become a problem...to solve that problem it's
best to take down Flappy Bird. On February 10, 2014 Flappy Bird was no
more. Knockoffs soon flooded the app store. It
was a valiant effort but people still craved the original. Some tried selling
their smartphones with Flappy Bird already downloaded for as much as
$100,000. The game was still playable there just wouldn't be any
software updates. However, one seller said eBay canceled his auction because the
company policy was that the phone had to be restored to factory settings before
it could be sold. After the demise of Flappy Bird, fake
news stories swirled around the creator. The satirical side Huzlers claimed the
Flappy Bird creator had committed suicide. There were suggestions Nintendo
had threatened to sue him which he denied the popular gaming site Kotaku
attacked Flappy Bird's creator for allegedly ripping off Nintendo's art.
Kotaku later ended up apologizing. The addiction, the spotlight, the
criticism all proved too much for Nguyen. It appears money no matter how much
really can't buy happiness. Nearly two years after the end of flappy
bird, Nguyen appeared to be in a much better place.
In December 2015 he tweeted: "I'm really happy these days. I finally have a team
that I fit in and we work together well. Not alone anymore." He came out with a
bunch of other games and he said that if users thought they were too addicting he
wouldn't hesitate to take them down as well.
But luckily for him, none would come close to the success of Flappy Bird.
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the offerings. Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I'm Cindy Pom.