Gamers in a flap as Vietnamese dev pulls Flappy Bird The Vietnamese developer of hugely popular smartphone game Flappy Bird hit the self-destruct button on the title over the weekend after complaining that it had ruined his life. In a message that has now been retweeted over 135,000 times, Hanoi-based Dong Nguyen wrote in a Twitter post on Saturday: “I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' …
I can see where the guy is coming from. Even extraordinarily minor celebrity - being known by a few thousand people, which I have experience with - can get creepy, and that's when it's expected and intended. But something like he's had happen, if it wasn't actually a goal? That could easily get brutal.
I think that people still tend to think that success and resources are simultaneous, but the latter can often perilously lag the former; being in the position of a lone guy who's suddenly expected to have PR, media savvy, and the development quality of the organizations that are normally making multi-million user games has got to be nerve wracking. And I'm willing to bet that a lot of people (say, those who are criticizing the game for being derivative) are judging his product as if it was made with resources and intentions that he never had.
On the bright side for fans, I've already noticed a gaggle of low-rent knock-offs slithering out of the woodwork; no doubt we'll soon be awash in "flappy candy bird story saga" clones to which we can unwittingly deliver our personal data to our hearts' content.
Living in Vietnam, after a week of making $50K a day he's probably made more than he could spend in his life. Unless he changes to a western lifestyle.
His email box was probably filled with 95% hate mail from people complaining about how hard the game was and how much time they've wasted on it and 5% scumbags trying to take his money.
A cynical westerner like you and I would just change our email address and be unaffected by all that, but that doesn't mean everyone could blithely assume everyone with a mother needing an operation is a scammer.
Dave Chapelle described what it was like when he went from obscurity to having $20M in the bank. The analogy he used was when Elmer Fudd would look at Bugs Bunny and all he would see was a side of meat. Dave described people he thought were friends as cold, demeaning, and demanding. He was rich and constantly under personal assault when he suddenly couldn't take it anymore and ran away to Africa.
Money doesn't change you, it changes the people around you.
Not that I am a fan, but I remember Mariah Carey saying something similar in an interview. She said when she had made a few million dollars from her records, she realised that a lot of her friends had changed, even those she thought she knew well. She suddenly found that very few of them were absolutely 100% trustworthy. A feeling which I think, even if I was that wealthy, would make me very lonely.
It was hardly a new type of game to begin with. I remember a very simple helicopter game where you had to hold the mouse button down to keep it going up and let go for it to go down while avoiding obstacles and the terrain. Is this identical to that helicopter game? No but it's close enough. If it's ok for him then why is it not ok for others?
>>Is it OK to rip off Nintendo's art assets though?
Now what was that saying you were taught about two wrongs?
>>Also, if he's not selling it anymore, how is he being ripped off?
Indie game developers run into this all the time, wanting to use assets from old games. "EA doesn't sell this game anymore and I don't want to make money off it, so that's OK, right?" Nope.
"Is it OK to rip off Nintendo's art assets though?"
"Also, if he's not selling it anymore, how is he being ripped off?"
I've seen it happen before. Some company goes bust, someone else tries to come in with a replacement product, and the bust company magically comes back to life claiming ownership.
Too much money is *NEVER* the reason anyone goes bust.
And the MS troll now goes "Intellectual Property Troll". Weee!!!
Copyright is intended to protect works for a limited amount of time, but thanks to Disney it now extends beyond the creator's lifetime thus the "limited" part being defeated. Companies keeping copyright on works no longer published, sold or distributed by them are defeating the purpose of copyright and don't deserve to have those "copy rights" enforced.
At least some companies have relented and instead of going copyright trolling, they've either relaxed their stance on stuff like this, or have even re-released the older games for sale.
In an iPhone game? I'd love to hear you justify spreading that rumour.
Non-legit ad revenue gets recalled whether or not the recipient is in business at the time, so quitting has no effect. And don't think we didn't notice your "fact.... speculating" contrivance, either. This sort of intentional nastiness is surely the guy's reason for getting out.
Yup, lots of very jealous people out there.
None of them ever just come out and say they are jealous though.
Instead they wrap it in a flag of morality (nobody should ever make $50k a day for 2 days of effort) or by spreading malicious rumours (bot traffic).
Leave the guy alone and rather than generating more vitriol, put your energy into doing something yourself.
It's sad this commercial success did not translate in greater happyness for its creator. Nobody will begrudge a small developer hitting it big. Too bad in this case it had an adverse effect.
Here's someone who creates a Flappy Bird knockoff in Blender's much maligned Game Engine:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blendernation/~3/7c1av9mP0Us/
It's very noticeable that installing an app for free, or costing pennies seems to grant the installer the right to slag off the developer, berate them for not adding features and get angry (properly angry) when it doesn't behave exactly as expected. It's even worse if the installer thinks that the developer is (gasp!) making money from it.
If he's been making $50,000 a day, that is a LOT of messages from people who feel they are entitled to a triple-A experience tailored to their exact playing style.
There are so many genuinely great original iPhone games such as the superb Magnetic Billiards that I wonder how games such as Flappy Birds become such hits while the good stuff goes relatively unnoticed.
Feel sure the Pickford Brothers or Jeff Minter would like a tenth of the attention/money that Flappy Birds has got!
I installed it on Saturday morning to fill the time on a train ride. Just in time it seems. Noticable was that it was small enough (a few hundred K IIRC) to do so over a mobile internet connection, and also that it required very few permissions. One I think, I forget which, probably internet connectivity for ads.
Having said that there appear to be no ads in the Android version.
It is damn hard though, I will probably uninstall it if I can't beat my score of 5 by the end of the week!
All the existing users can still play the game. So if he was making $50k per day from them, he will continue to do so. He just won't make any more from new users.
Of course it'll die down in a few weeks anyway as people gradually stop playing. But he gets to stop a lot of hassle immediately, whilst still coining it in. Smart guy.
Last I heard he kept sheep and llamas on his plot of land in Wales, but no yaks.
(Actually, I recall being told that yaks can't survive at low altitudes because the air pressure would kill them... I wonder if this is an urban myth...
...google...
Wikipedia says they "do not thrive at lower altitudes", so it's not instantly fatal, but also that they begin to suffer heat exhaustion at 15 degrees Celsius.)
(Goddammit... I need to get a job.)
Hi all, I tried to uninstall Flappy Birds from my 5S but now it's saying "Error 0x80070079: The semaphore timeout period has expired" and I can no longer switch it off or get back to the home screen. In addition my ram is turning mauve. I've tried rebooting, I also switched it off and back on again and nothing seems to be working for me. Has anyone else experienced this and know how to fix it? Please help I'm absolutely at my wits end with this f^&%ing thing!!!!
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