Flappy Bird can't fly anymore
Nguyen Ha Dong, a Hanoi-based game developer, announced the grounding of the addictive game in a Tweet at 1900 GMT on Saturday in which he also apologised to Flappy Bird players.
“22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down,” Dong said adding: “It is not anything related to legal issues.”
“I cannot take this anymore,” he wrote.
Flappy Bird has caused a sensation after rising out of 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 50 million 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 had turned his telephone 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, has been earning on average $50,000 a day from advertising, Dong said in a media interview.
Source: Globe and Mail