Flappy Bird Creator on Why Game Was Pulled
The sole, Vietnam-based creator of Flappy Bird has chimed in to let the masses know why his game was pulled from the smartphone market.
Polygon reported that in an interview with Forbes, Dong Nguyen had removed Flappy Bird from Google Play and the iTunes App Store because it had "become a problem." Nguyen stated that it was because it such an addictive product that he pulled it; he was not expecting it to reach the astounding amounts of popularity that it did overseas.
"My life has not been as comfortable as I was before. I couldn't sleep," Nguyen said to Forbes, whom he spoke with after meeting Vietnam's deputy prime minister.
Based on the initial success of Flappy Bird, Nguyen was thinking of making a sequel (Flappier Bird?) to his hit game that was raking in $50,000 in ad-revenue on a daily basis. Many skeptics believe that since the game was out on the market since May 24, 2013 and was met with overnight success at the end of December 2013, that Nguyen may have used bot programs to repeatedly download his game en masse, which would have raised its ranking on market lists and resulted in more attention being given to it. Nguyen replied to these allegations on Twitter saying, "It doesn't matter. Don't you think? If I did fake it, should Apple let it live for months?"
Based on our review of Flappy Bird, another possible reason could be that legal matters were involved of the makers of Piou Piou, a flash game that was ported to smartphones and made in 2011. Piou Piou plays, and looks, an awful lot like Flappy Bird -- big yellow creature that continuously falls, tap to make it rise, fit it into gaps of green, rectangular cacti, etc. Whatever the reasons really are, Flappy Bird can only be remembered now, as it's no longer available on any app stores.