Whatever is the reality about Flappy Bird, it is inconceivable for me that at the same time an IT world that is incredibly capitalist, interested in big earnings, VC moneys, and where success is measured in rounds and exits, at the same time, can't accept that: 1) A simple game can earn 50k and is deserved, if people like the game. 2) That there is no need to search at any cost some hidden reason to remove the game. 3) That one does not need to get insane and/or break to go away from money.
I don't think he "went insane". He received threats. He lives in a poor country (and probably violent) and likely doesn't want to raise flags as the guy earning 50k a day.
This is just first world people forgetting there are violent and politically delicate countries elsewhere, I guess.
Homicide rate might not correlate to robbery, harrassment, or extortion. Not to mention the political issue of richness in a nominally Communist nation.
Homicide would definitely seem to correlate with robbery and extortion, robbery by accident and extortion for the basic reason that otherwise it would be quite hard to extort as nobody would take you seriously.
I suspect that the issue of richness might be a social consideration, but they have a progressive tax code that goes up to 35% for those making more than ~ $45,000 per year and there do not appear to be any legal restrictions on maximum income.
Oh, and they have been nominally socialist since the late 80's when they got rid of the whole planned economy thing.
edit - I just thought, Vietnam strikes me as a particularly bad place to try and run an extortion racket. Whatever you try and threaten them with had better be bloody scary otherwise you run a serious risk of being laughed at by an old bloke with lots of tunneling experience.
He has several top games in the app store game section, I believe he had already a lot of money, so not earning more does not stop treats if that's the problem, and at this point he was already too popular. Actually removing the game made him a lot more popular. About poor countries: if you have money, you have power in poor countries, unlikely to get touched if you pay the right people a fraction of what you have.
Leaving your country is not a simple decision based on money. It means leaving your old life, friends and sometimes family behind. It's understandable he might not even consider this.
Are you suggesting that all non-Western countries civilians are living in fear for their life? This is a new level of ignorance. Even if you just meant Vietnam, believe or not, a lot of things have changed in the last few decades.
No. Not everyone in "non-Western countries" wants to move to a "Western country." That being said, someone that may not normally want to relocate to a "Western country" may have a desire to do so if they have significant fear of their life in their own country.
I don't think he really feared for his life, what seems much more likely, especially given his statements about the media, is that he thought that people were being complete dicks, so he took his ball and left.
Read this, despite the title. It describes truths about public creation generally, and should be of particular interest to HNers who dream of going into indie game development.
I had a brief foray into indie game development. Luckily, my game "Discretion" was quickly swallowed into Android Market obscurity and only sold a couple 100. Out of this I got 1 (one) real fan, who emailed me a couple of times being really positive and nagged me for the one update I did for the game. Sometimes, I count myself lucky :)
It would have been nice to keep doing that for a living, though.
If you ever do decide to do it again, or if anyone reading decides to make a game, please pick a name that can be easily googled. Mentioning the game anywhere is a form of marketing, but it's useless if it's not something that the reader can immediately and indiscriminately find by typing into google "name game".
Googling discretion game turned up 31 million results, with none of the first page links seeming to be your game. Just a small pet peeve I have, I guess.
And I think that's the point of the article. To make money, you have to put up with a lot of other BS. (Same as working in a bank or large company, just that the BS is more public in gaming)
The review systems on the app stores, and internet comments more generally do have a tenancy to bring out the hate, and the article does a great job of exploring the effects of this.
As people who designs user interfaces and interactions, I wonder what we can do to bring out more respectful reviews and comments, to remind users of the human on the other side of the app...
That's a completely worthwhile cause, imo. One of my colleagues, Aaron Zinman, (hi, Aaron!) spent a lot of time thinking about that. You can find some of his work at [1] and [2].
The other day after meditating, I had in insight into why the hate comes out. It has to do with when we go online, we're trained to imitate characters, not ourselves. This thought will require additional unraveling. We also need to steel ourselves to inflammatory comments and inhibit ourselves from escalating them, too. But I can't believe people threatened the Flappy Birds guy.
Great point. Situations like this make it abundantly clear that folks out there are more than happy to bash away at some poor indie the other side of the world, as well as making demands, publicly vilifying and the like. I guess it's the Internet. It's trained us to be angry in public at anonymous faces, so when the faces are other people, it's a lot easier to treat them like they aren't.
"I guess it's the Internet." I don't think we should accept this though. I think most people would benefit from having "thicker skin", but at the same rate we should not rationalize boorish & hostile behavior. Anonymity does not have to lead to ass hattery.
I don't think this article is anywhere near accurate of the current situation. The author doesn't know the creator of Happy Birds personally, and makes a lot of presumptions whilst perhaps projecting a lot of his own issues onto him.
I'm more inclined to think the creator took the game down to save himself being sued to oblivion and keep whatever money he currently has.
He did an interview with Forbes and clearly stated that he was not being sued. If he was, we know about it since I'm sure the thousands of other clones would be sued and the company suing them would want some publicity.
I never said he was currently being sued. Also many of the clones probably don't make the money the original does.
I personally believe he's probably some poor indie developer who's practically won the lottery and realizes he could loose it all by all the attention he's received. Removing the app, and disappearing until everything settles down, (whilst still making residual revenue from all the current installs), is the best way for him to mitigate his growing risk of being sued, which is probably scary for him and out of his depth, being a solo indie developer from Vietnam.
Of course he could just be a crazy irrational indie developer as the article assumes, among a number of other explanations which we will probably never know the truth :)
I'm not a developer and I've never put something together like this, however, having spent some time in the far east in my teen years and early twenties I know what it can be like when you become 'famous' or rich overnight. You can get a lot of unwanted attention, that may even put your family in actual threat of harm and danger. That is not a nice feeling and makes it very hard to sleep at night and even think during the day.
I really feel for this guy. I don't know what it's like in Vietnam, but given it's part of the far east, I wouldn't be surprised if he's had death threats and similar. Fame and riches don't necessarily lead to a happier life in these places, you need power along with it too.
That said, it's entirely possible that it has nothing to do with the any threat of actual harm and danger from external forces but just the barrage of envy, criticism and perhaps unwarranted attention. That's a problem that can be fixed.
If there are any indie developers out there that ever find them in such a bind or position, I'm making this plain and simple offer to you all. Please feel free to reach out to me. I'll help you work through it. I've helped plenty others in similar situations, and ultimately it's all about just 'getting out of your own shell' for want of a better phrase - and I can help you do that.
Hope that helps if anyone is reading this. Contact details in my profile.
Seemed to me like he was reacting to the threats he got online, not really anything to do where he lives. Strange that HNers seem to keep focusing on that.
For anyone who this article interested, I highly recommend watching Indie Game: The Movie. To say the least, it was eye-opening for me, as someone who hasn't put much creative work in the public space in any very visible way.
It's incredibly humanizing to see these people who built indie games that I enjoy greatly go through the amount of stress that they do, all over pieces of software that most people rarely blink an eye at.
It's also completely understanding when people like Phil Fish or Don Nguyen quit the industry. It takes a certain mindset, and I don't think people who start making games for the fun of expressing themselves fully realize it at first.
I love that movie, and will stick up for Phil Fish any time. It's really easy for nobodies to sit in obscurity and shit on the guy for doing some of the things he did, but I love him for it. I love that somebody in his position had the guts to tell jackasses to fuck off.
I very much agree... It is a great movie, and shows (though in a "movie way", which, of course, should not be treated as 100% "the real thing") how is more than just money. It can be very personal.
To make an analogy, Dong Nguyen essentially tapped into the modern-day equivalent of Pac-Man Fever. In the 80s, it swept the world, to the tune of billions of dollars. It was the highest-grossing arcade game ever produced. People simply loved the game, and they couldn't get enough of clearing boards of dots, power-pellets and ghosts.
Most people probably knew nothing about who made the game, with the small exception of the corporate names on the game (e.g., Namco/Midway). Certainly, I suspect only the hardcore few would be able to name the programmer of Pac-Man, Shigeo Funaki. And I suspect that no one blinked their eyes in disdain when they saw the news reports of Pac-Man's financial success.
In a similar way, Flappy Bird took very simple game-play, and combined it with a simple challenge. This is, of course, not the first game to do this, but it took off so successfully that I suspect that a very high percentage of gamers have it installed, and even some non-gamers could likely brand-identify the game, or have at least heard of it. The power of the Internet has made Nguyen's name known, and quite sadly in some circles, despised for his financial success.
No one bemoaned Pac-Man's programmer, or Namco/Midway's success, but fast-forward from the 80s to today, and you get gems like this article [1] and its intellectual lamenting with, "[...] I begrudge a society that would turn it into a phenomenon."
I suspect that the author would have said the same about Pac-Man.
Casual games like Flappy Bird do not prevent someone from playing, say, EVE Online, to their heart's content. And, what if you just happen to like both types of games? I guess you are a real outcast at that point; a non-intellectual. To put it another way, just because you intellectually eschew casual games and choose instead to rock, say, Steel Battalion with a full-on controller [2] doesn't mean that you are necessarily leading the upliftment of society.
Fortunately, there is a game in the world for every gamer.
This might be niave of me, but couldn't he just accept his $50,000 a day and simply not read the hate he was getting? It's not like he has to go on the computer every day - he could just do something else for a couple of weeks (at the most) until it all dies down and be $mucho better off.
I spent longer than the three days he's supposed to have spent on my latest game[1] and I would love a response like he's got.
From what I've heard the Vietnamese media went crazy trying to contact him, organise meetings, put his family into the media spotlight. Vietnam's still a communist state, don't forget - making this kind of money puts unwanted attention on him from state and from organised criminals in the area. I bet his family didn't want that kind of attention.
I'm betting this is the reason why he pulled the plug. I live in Bolivia and would hate this attention. People kidnap your family, criminals target you, etc.
"Hey person. You, the overwhelmed one in the corner, scared for your life. Here's a bucket of money. Stop being scared and overwhelmed. This bucket of money is good. Why are you so overwhelmed if you now have this bucket of money?"
Does that sound stupid? That's basically what you're saying.
It's really really easy to make those calls from the relative security of a day job or college, to look over at struggling entrepreneurs and say "But all you had to do was X...why didn't you do X?"
It ain't that simple or striaghtforward or obvious when you're the one on the sharp end.
I don't know if it happened in this case, but it's not uncommon for the Internet Hate Machine to go after their targets offline, including phone calls, mail, and SWATting[1], or involving friends and family of the target.
Would you not be curious what people were saying about you and your app? And would it not be advantageous as an app developer to know the feedback you are getting and be able to improve your app? I think these are the sort of reasons combined with the fact that people are very resourceful and persistent in obtaining your contact details make it very difficult to just ignore what people are saying. But its a good point and with some effort you could probably mask your identity to some degree, the trouble is once one comment has really got to you, it doesn't really matter.
After reading /r/gamedev on Flappy Bird I got quite disgusted by their community. I hope doesn't represent the whole game development community. They seriously compared Flappy Bird to more in-depth games and took its success as some kind of threat without even realizing that short and addictive entertainment does sell. You can't compare Flappy Birds to "bigger" games, it just doesn't make sense. Flappy Birds is an amazing game in its own right.
It's embarrassing but in my experience many game developers are quick to denigrate Flappy Birds. I don't think it's restricted to /r/gamedev. We can speculate as to why game developers feel the need to rip games apart, but ultimately I think it's amazing that Dong created such a hit and a shame that he's felt overwhelmed by the community's response.
This article definitely rings true. As someone who has published a few apps in the past, not even games, 90% of feedback received was negative and completely nonconstructive. It takes a while to realise it is nothing to do with the quality of your work or in most cases at all related. Regardless due to the low volume of downloads I received I responded to every single email or comment requesting more constructive feedback and mostly never got a response. In some cases I actually managed to help users with the ways they were using the apps which gave me a good sense of satisfaction, but mostly it was a complete waste of time. In one instance I really regretted replying as it just encourages further abuse.
Looking back all I can say is I can sympathise with anyone who has this problem and would also like to note weirdly I've never had the same experience with web apps. I can only assume the demographic of usage and ease of commenting on and contacting developers of mobile apps/games affects the feedback and comments you get.
This makes me want to start a blog to share and mock all the irrational hatred I'll receive if I ever make a successful app.
I'm not sure if that'd actually be a good idea, but there are so many trolls out there getting a hardon from sending despicable threats from a position of anonimity and non-accountability, that I think exposing those creeps somehow would be a public service.
That would be a good side-project if you were to start a "hate filter" company who's sole purpose is to filter the hate for a client, and present it to them, perhaps, as a dry statistic. You could then take the content and expose it. Now the haters become the brunt of the joke - it would be great to associate their real names with their hate, as well.
I have in the past (as someone who publishes artistic projects on the Web) employed other people to collate and filter the feedback we've had. It's a lot easier to face an 80-comment thread where 20 comments are contentless abuse if you can just read a single line that says "Negative, no specific focus: 25%".
When you understand that the majority of people out there are followers, cannot be bothered to risk making anything on their own, are in constant search of leaders to tell them what to say and believe, and take the lowest-effort path to approval and attention (eg sensationalist simple-minded criticism), and that there are others out there who are aware of this and exploit it (eg bloggers), and that all this is the norm and has been, you'll be better prepared to deal with, or better, ignore the haters.
People are lazy and selfish and will do whatever it takes to satisfy both behaviors.
If they go insane or experience serious anxiety, it's because some of the players are nit-wit jerks who feel the need to disparage, insult and threaten the developers on forums and social media outlets, and sometimes in real life.
Seriously (in the case of the Nguyen [1]), threatening a game developer of a (arguably) very mundane and free game because the dev decided it's not worth his time nor is the game's popularity aligned with his moral imperatives? This type of shit GRINDS my gears.
> One angry message has more effect than ten friendly ones.
This is something more people need to be aware of in general: these kind of messages are processed by two entirely different mental systems that do not cancel each other out, with the negative emotions having a much larger relative weight because they evolved out of the "avoiding things that kill you" mechanisms, which is kind of a big deal in evolutionary terms.
That's a shame the developer was doing quite good with "Flappy Birds" he should probably re-consider taking it off the genie is already out of the bottle and taking it off now would not change anything.
Fuck it dude it doesn't matter just ignore anything relating to it it will go away eventually.
Give it time the internet has a short attention span. They'll see something more shiny soon enough.
I don't get the "everyone is a critic these days" argument.
We are entitled to our own opinions. As long as the opinions are expressed in a non-insulting manner, we have the right to utter them. We don't need a PhD, we don't need somebody's permission, we don't need to be rich, tall, fat, etc.
Remain polite but don't refrain from saying what you think!
I claim that there is MUCH MORE to this Flappy Bird story then his feelings were hurt so bad he left $50,000 a day.
The on going rumor is he bought reviews and that he was found out. The hammer from Apple and Google was going to come down, but now he can save face and come out with a game a few months later with clean reviews.
Glad the programer was able to make $1,500,000 so far it seems. Maybe he just retired and is going to enjoy life, I hope this is the real answer.
I too claim that there is MUCH MORE to this Flappy Bird story then his feelings were hurt so bad he left $50,000 a day.
I'm pretty sure that this whole saga was orchestrated between the reptiloids and the people who live in the hollow earth--by convincing the current surface-dwellers to spend all their time tapping on smart-phone screens, they've assured a constant source of low-frequency vibrations which can be used to prime the time cube, helping to ensure that four-dimensional time will finally be brought into the mainstream conciousness.
He quit because his Illuminati handler told him that sufficient work had been completed, and that they could return back to Majestic.
The man was foolish to reveal his stellar earnings to the international press while living in a third world, communist, authoritarian country where many businessmen travel with fleets of bodyguards.
As someone who also lives in a similar country, I can say with near certainty that THAT was probably the cause of the deletion.
I think this is the real reason. And as well he announced it was going to be deleted in 24hrs... giving people final chance to buy it... if he really did want to stop it he would have pulled it straight away (I am assume the app stores let you do this - I don't know). He's milking it for what he can be being cautious. I don't blame him.
I suspect you're right, though I'm hoping it was done unintentionally, that he hired a company or acquaintance to "promote" the game, and it resulted in bot-fueled reviews and downloads.
The smoking gun is that he had two other games in the top ten, and that happened without in-app cross-promotion. People would have to look-up Flappy Birds in the app store and click on the "also by" link to even find those games, and there's no way enough people would be doing that to place them in the #2 and #6 slot.
That article says the opposite of what you claimed. That is, they acknowledge that some people made the accusations, but they explicitly state they found no evidence:
The game's sheer success has led some critics to accuse Nguyen of using shady practices — including buying traffic or paying for fake reviews — in order to help Flappy Bird ascend the app charts. After looking at the data that corresponds to when Flappy Bird started to build word-of-mouth buzz, however, we can't find any signs of impropriety, or manipulation of reviews or ratings.
Do you think either Apple or Google bring down the "hammer" for fake reviews? Hint: They don't. They remove the fake reviews, but if there were really a ban hammer it would be a fantastic way of getting your competitor's apps removed, now wouldn't it?
So no, that isn't the reason.
And FWIW, seeing sporadic spikes in attention does not prove that he bought reviews, and that post that hit the front-page here claiming so was just libelous, speculative garbage: For virtually every spike you could find a Vine meme or YouTube play-alonger who happened to pick it up. Organic growth for fringe game can come in fits, and those who automatically ascribe to malice have personality defects.
Nor does the "he was going to be sued" nonsense have any rational foundation -- this game is no less derivative than virtually all apps on the market, or the websites that we use and celebrate (OMG The Intercept is just a lame ripoff of Engadget but about surveillance).
The jealousy that crowds out rational discussion is boring.
Yes because indie developers lead such horribly unique lives. Another pompous piece of shit Jeff Vogel calls his blog. Get off your ivory tower. People go nuts every day and every place.
