New and digital media #13

Flappy Bird creator takes down madly popular game as he had threatened

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/10/flappy-bird-creator-takes-game-down

The developer of Flappy Bird, the former most popular free mobile game on Apple and Android devices, has taken the game down as he announced he would do earlier in the weekend. 

The game is no longer available to download. but users can still play the game if they already downloaded it to their devices. 

Nguyen Ha Dong, a Hanoi-based game developer, announced the grounding of the addictive game in a tweet on Saturday in which he also apologised to Flappy Bird players. 

“Twenty-two hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down,” Dong said, adding “it is not anything related to legal issues. 

“I cannot take this any more,” he wrote. 

Flappy Bird caused a sensation after rising from obscurity to become one of the most downloaded mobile games on both Apple and Google’s online stores. 

Users have to steer a bird between green pipes. The Android version has been downloaded up to 50m times and attracted more than half a million reviews. 

Many people have been questioning Dong on Twitter about his decision to take down the game as only a day earlier he had been talking about developing the game for Microsoft’s Windows phones. 

Dong could not be reached for comment. He turned his phone off after cancelling an interview with Reuters on Thursday and not finalising arrangements for one on Friday. 

Unlike other successful game makers such as Rovio Entertainment, which produced the hugely popular Angry Birds game and has hundreds of programmers, Dong made Flappy Bird by himself in a few nights, he said on Twitter earlier.

The game, which he said was inspired by Nintendo’s Mario Bros, had been earning on average $50,000 a day from advertising, Dong said in a media interview. 

Two friends of Dong said Nintendo had sent him a warning letter, but the Japanese game maker said it was not considering a lawsuit. 

“It sounds very much like a rumour and if it is, we certainly can’t comment on that,” Nintendo’s media representative told Reuters on Friday. 

Flappy bird had received many views and 50m people had downloaded the game, this shows how popular it was and how word of mouth spread within a few hours, and everyone had been downloading it. It was a very frustrating game as it was hard to get through the pipes. The developer of flappy bird had stuck to his words and removed Flappy bird from app store, which meant people weren't able to download it and play it. However, the people who already downloaded it were still able to play the game.