The work of an entrepreneur can take a while to get noticed, but for Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen, it was a different case.
Nguyen released Flappy Bird on May 24, 2013 to Apple’s iOS app store. And for the past couple months, it has blown up across the world.
It used assets from a company called Nintendo, specifically the Mario franchise, that included the pipes and background. The bird is a combination of a few creatures.
For most, Flappy Bird is the equivalent of shovel-ware, or games that are created that to cash in on new mediums without innovating them.
Kenneth Clow, marketing professor, believes the success is due to three things: understanding the players and how they use their mobile devices and what games the target audience likes to play. Clow also said it’s luck or “offering the right game at the right time.”
Nguyen was allegedly making $50,000 a day from ad revenue of people playing.
Tech blog, Bluecloud Solutions, speculated that one of the reasons that Flappy Bird was successful was because he was artificially creating a high approval rating for his app, even though the creator claims he has done nothing to augment the game, nor promoted it via advertisement.
To play the game, players tap on their phone to help the bird fly through a series of pipes. The game’s difficulty soon became an internet joke and went viral.
But not everyone took it as a joke. The creator began receiving death threats from people around the world. That, and the stress of handling the popularity that came with the game, caused him to remove the app. He announced its removal on Feb. 8.
Tanner Traweek, a junior majoring in Biology, was astonished about the creator’s decision.
“I don’t understand how a couple of spineless threats would make him take the app off. I’m sure most app developers get death threats too. No one is actually going to kill him,” Mr. Traweek said.
While the application has been removed from the IOS and Google Play store, people can still play it if they have it downloaded. This means that as long as people still continue to play it, Nguyen still gets paid for it.
Bonus info:
Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen made $50,000 a day from ad revenue due to game plays. He made the decision to remove the game from the app market due to potential legal issues over the game’s design, death threats from Flappy Bird users and a dislike of the popularity he received from the game. Although the game is no longer available, he continues to make money from the people who still have the app installed.
