The young creator of one of the most popular games on smartphones everywhere has been removed.
Flappy Bird is no long on App Stores and Google Player due to the success of the game has maddeningly made it difficult on its creator Nguyen Ha Dong, 29. A tweet from the game’s creator suggested that its sudden success had its problems.
“I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down,” developer Dong Nguyen wrote on Saturday. “I cannot take this anymore.”
The game was downloaded more than 50 million times on App Store alone. In an interview with The Verge website, Dong said “Flappy Bird” was making $50,000 a day in advertising revenue
Tech blogger Carter Thomas said the sudden popularity of Flappy Bird might have been due to use of fake accounts run by computers to create downloads and reviews. On Twitter he didn’t address the inflated downloads allegation but denied suggestions he was withdrawing the game because it breached another game maker’s copyright.
“It is not anything related to legal issues,” he said. “I just cannot keep it anymore.”
Last week, “Flappy Bird” had an average four-star rating from more than 543,000 reviews in the Apple App Store and 228,000 on Android. Many of the reviews were lengthy, tongue-in-cheek tales of time lost, marriages ended and people going cuckoo after playing the game.
