We’re less than two hours away from the supposed removal of Flappy Bird from the Android and Apple iOS app stores after creator Dong Nguyen said that he “couldn’t take” all the attention and criticism any more and was deleting the top selling game from both the marketplaces.
Nguyen has been completely silent in the last day since the announcement, but according to his deadline, Flappy Bird should be gone soon. Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen.
But intentional or not, Nguyen’s announcement of the removal of the game has turned into what could possibly be the most genius act of marketing in the history of the app market.
Yesterday afternoon, I checked to see if Flappy Bird had been removed early from the store for some reason. It hadn’t, and had about 75,000 reviews, averaging around four stars. This morning, I woke up to check again, and see now that the game has 146,000 reviews. Unless I’m remembering the original number wrong, that sort of jump is astounding, and likely corresponds to a huge number of new downloads.
What we’re looking at here is “Disney vault” syndrome. Growing up, I always wondered why Disney bothered locking movies in “the vault,” only to take them out for brief sales from time to time. By making the movies scarce, they would see a huge surge of sales before the movie was “locked away” and unavailable. Fans of the movie would make sure they had all the copies they wanted, or those who hadn’t seen it would pick it up to not miss out.
That’s exactly what’s happened here with Flappy Bird. Players are rushing out to finally download this game they’ve been hearing so much about since it’s going to be gone within a day. Fans are rating the game highly to presumably try to save it. The story of a man shutting down a game that’s supposedly making him $50,000 a day is unheard of, and has lured even the most stoic resisters of Flappy Bird to at least see what all the commotion is about. While I don’t have actual app download numbers yet, you can bet you’re going to see nothing short of a huge spike for the already #1 game when or if that data comes out.
There’s a running theory that Nguyen is some sort of secret marketing genius, and this was all a big ploy to increase downloads of the game. After all, even if he does remove the app from the store, it is not erased off of your phone or tablet. And neither are its in game ads. The app should continue making him consistent revenue, even if it’s no longer being actively sold. And after yesterday, that will likely be even more than $50,000 a day, if those original figures were accurate.
Also, some speculate the move is a preemptive strike to avoid being gone after by a giant like Nintendo , whose influence is felt very strongly in Flappy Bird’s art design, or a smaller game like Piou Piou, which Flappy Bird essentially cloned, right down to the titular bird itself.
I’m not inclined to believe this ‘diabolical’ version of the story. While we still know relatively little about Dong Nguyen (he could be Peter Molyneux in a mask for all we know), I think that he really is just a guy overwhelmed by the level of fame and infamy Flappy Bird has brought him. I don’t think this was a deliberate marketing plot to boost sales of the game or evade lawsuits. Rather, I think it was a genuine attempt to shed the spotlight, albeit one of the most misguided ones I’ve ever seen.
Nguyen has amassed an additional 60,000+ Twitter followers in the past day, quadrupling his old total. It’s a little hard to believe he truly thought announcing he was erasing the most popular game in the world would drawless attention from the press and public, but I’ll take him at his word. The truth is we do not know Nguyen’s mental state or core motivations. We have to work with the facts we have.
– Nguyen has likely made at least a million or two from Flappy Bird already
– This announcement has spiked sales of the game, and even after its removal from the store, it will continue to bring in revenue
– Nguyen has other popular titles high up on the charts of the app stores, and indicators are he has no plans to delete those
I think we’re all a bit confused as to what Nguyen’s goal is here. Does he care about the money, or doesn’t he? Will he remove his other games if they rise in popularity and draw criticism? I understand he’s just a “normal person” which could explain his confusing reaction to fame, but nearly every household name was once a nobody, from J.K. Rowling to the yearly winner of American Idol. That’s sort of how fame works.
Perhaps it’s more accurate to view Nguyen as a lottery winner rather than a talented author or singer who finally hit the big time. He bought a ticket by making his simplistic game, and through nothing short of magic and luck, it exploded. And I don’t think I need to tell you that many people who win the lottery end up having their lives ruined by the windfall.
I expect this post to be criticized as “part of the problem” as Nguyen claims to want to be left alone. But the media can’t simply ignore this story, and so long as we treat Nguyen respectfully when seeking out his side of things, I don’t see the issue. Emailing someone for comment is not harassment, and no one is following around Nguyen like the paparazzi. We’re just trying to bring you answers to a very perplexing story, and if you say you don’t care and we shouldn’t either, 1.1 million views on this post would disagree.
I’m hoping we’ll hear more from Nguyen today, so stay tuned for further developments.
FinanCell 