14 DAY TRIAL // As promised, Vietnamese iOS developer Dong Nguyen has retracted his controversial Flappy Bird game from iTunes, amid a huge backlash from the media and consumers alike.
It all began when Flappy started climbing the ranks on iTunes, becoming the most downloaded free game and raking in $50,000 / €37,000 daily for the developer, purely from ads. People soon discovered it was annoying as hell, but also quite addictive.
Some even filmed themselves doing so-called guides on how to beat the game. Many of the videos end up with the protagonist taking a hammer to the phone, in disapproval of the immense difficulty level.
Nguyen then suddenly said he couldn’t take this bad press anymore and promised to the world that he’d pull the game.
“I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it,” he said on Twitter.
Some say Nguyen had some bots help out with the downloads, but the developer denies these reports. It seems plausible that he wanted the game out of the app store before someone started an investigation, don't you think? Who cares about bad press when it pays this well? Just ask the Kardashians.