The whole Flappy Bird story is absolutely fascinating … from the rise to the fall, it is the stuff of pure Internet wonderment.
Second, for good or ill, Flappy Bird had become controversial. Last week, my fellow reporters and I noticed some chatter on Twitter about how the game and Nguyens other titles had suddenly risen in popularity. We saw people suggesting that Nguyen may have used bots—computer programs that would repeatedly download and/or auto-generate reviews of the game in order to raise its app rankings. We were intrigued, but couldnt find anyone who had proof and left that story alone. Since then, Ive seen blog posts from people who are sure Nguyen did or didnt get help from bots.
I would love to learn more about that developer. He is so intriguing and mysterious! Flappy Bird is the forbidden fruit of the app store…LOL. My only regret is not downloading it in time…
My saving grace is that my daughter has been playing it so I was able to get it from the “purchased” apps section of the app store. He was making 50k a day, according to some reports … the whole story is just way too interesting not to dig deeper into.
That was a crazy story – assuming it was true – why would anybody give up that $50k/day? That popularity might be believable as my daughter told me before it was pulled that it was the most popular game among her and her friends. Personally I can see how it could be considered addicting…
I read that he just lost control of his life and did not like what the game was doing to people — he called it massively addictive. It is a crazy story!