The more people who are addicted, the more ad revenue it's generating." "Anyone who has the app on their phone will continue to generate revenue and push ad impressions. "What's kind of ironic is that app is probably making more money now than it was a week ago," said Krisha Subramanian, who co-founded (and then sold) Mobclix, a major mobile ad network platform, noting how much attention Nguyen got by saying, in advance, that he would shut down Flappy Bird. And Nguyen will continue to rake in the dough. Until Nguyen decides to turn off the ads that are being served up in the game, or until the public decides en masse to stop playing, those tens of millions of people who have the game and play it endlessly are going to keep on serving up countless numbers of ad impressions.
More to the point, though, especially given how much incredulity there's been about a man walking away from sudden riches, that's not the case at all. It does mean (if he's true to his word that he's out and out done with Flappy Bird) that there won't be any further updates, but the game will still work fine. For one thing, Nguyen's decision to remove the game from Apple's App Store and Google Play doesn't in any way affect people who already downloaded it - the very people who are already addicted. It's gone forever."īut fear not, Flappy Bird addicts: That notion is rather unrealistic. To solve that problem, it's best to take down Flappy Bird. "But it happened to become an addictive product. "Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed," Nguyen told Forbes. Indeed, Forbes reported today that Nguyen said Flappy Bird is dead "permanently," a victim to its addictive nature. He later told Forbes he couldn't confirm the $50,000 number, saying only that he knows "it's a lot." And on the other, people were dumbfounded that the developer, a single man living with his parents in Vietnam, would just up and walk away from the riches pouring in.Īfter all, Nguyen told The Verge last week, the game's massive popularity - with more than 50 million people having downloaded it - was earning him $50,000 per day, thanks to the billions of ad impressions Flappy Bird was serving up to the millions of people (myself included) who could not manage to put it down.
On the one hand, some people were terrified that they wouldn't be able to play the highly addictive game anymore. Over the past few days, there's been a global outcry in the wake of Nguyen's seemingly inexplicable decision to stop making the game available for download. Don't worry folks, Flappy Bird developer Dong Nguyen is still getting paid.