Some context would be nice. I have no idea who this guy is (or Flappy Bird) and why we should care.

Flappy Bird is a silly game in which you tap on the screen of your touch device to nagivate a (duck?) through a series of narrow paths delineated by tubes sprouting from the sky and ground. In the tradition of older 8 bit video games it's extremely unforgiving one mistake and you have to start over. It's apparently been a big hit. In regard to who the guy is, he is the developer of that silly game which he did for fun part time, it's blown up and he is tired of people harassing him. As to why people should care? I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

I don't get it.

Why did he get harassed?

Because he made money?

He got harassed because the game looks like it didn't take much work, and it's more popular than people think it deserves to be.

You fail so many times that it shows so much ads, I don't know how ad payment work, but it must be profitable. Does not make sense to shut down because of some haters.

I understand that he is probably wanting to get away from all the press coverage but I'm pretty sure this is not the right way to go about it. This might actually have the opposite effect. I had no intention of downloading it but knowing it is about to be removed, I'm going to download it.

Maybe that's what he wants to happen?

He's really a PR genius. When he restores Flappy Bird to the app store next week, after a week of the media writing about how it was taken down abruptly, It'll blow up even more.

When - if - he removes it from the app store, Clumsy Bird [insert clone here] will take over his sales momentum, and Flappy Bird will never be heard from again.

My teenager students will be devastated by this. They really liked the game. We also had a good class discussion about adverts, the amount of money you can get from adverts, and the cost of living in Hanoi.

The main thing is that they worked out that there is a human being who lives somewhere and who has a name sitting down at a computer and hacking away at this game so they can play it.

Incidentally, Hanoi is a really nice town, and unlike most neighbouring jurisdictions Vietnam doesn't tax imported food and wine products to oblivion. Internet there's a lot better than in neighbouring China or Laos, and they don't have a Cambodia/Sweden style history of randomly exfiltrating hackers without due legal process.

Has any politically contentious hackers decided to live there who were not Vietnamese?

Hanoi is an enormous city. The internet has gotten worse in Vietnam. Bloggers are regularly arrested for having opinions. Starting sometime last year, Vietnam has put some heavy restrictions on the internet. Look up Decree 72. You are no longer allowed to share news stories. Having said that, Vietnam is still a beautiful country with delicious food.

Cost of living in Hanoi is so high because of strict building codes. They have these towers, you see, and they constantly have to move them a floor at a time across the city, and the larger floors have to sit below the smaller floors, with a severely constrained workforce. It's a logistics nightmare.

They should hire someone to devise a strategy so they can move the floors more optimally.

If someone were able to do that, they could leverage it into a very high-up position somewhere. Three-post towers of hanoi is an easy problem. Four-post is still unsolved.

The owner is pretty vague about it on twitter, but I'm pretty sure they're taking it down due to how it effects their quality of life:

https://twitter.com/dongatory/status/432095426854912000

Sounds like he made a mistake and is paying for it now. If he really wanted a simple life, he should not have published a game under his own name.

It's a big pain in the ass to register an App Store account as a company vs as an individual. Especially if it's something as small and casual as this.

It may be a pain, but the game is generating a lot of attention and money. The prudent choice would be to release the app under a company's name. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Dry your tears with the money, dude! Rake it in while you can!

I feel for the guy. He made something a while ago, put on the market without much fanfare and then out of the blue his game suddenly shot to the top and raked in 50 million downloads. If you're not expecting it and you don't have the right people around you, all this publicity (a lot of which is quite negative, despite the game's popularity) can be pretty hard to take for some people. Remember Susan Boyle's breakdown post her win on Britain's Got Talent?

Having said that, I've spent a couple of hours playing it since the first posts on HN showed up (yesterday) and got myself a top score of 50. I feel the appeal is in its simplicity.

I hope the creator takes some time out and gets the support he needs.

This is actually quite common behavior. You see this a lot in any sort of craft where you get sudden and unexpected success, they end up resenting their creation or feel some disconnect between the effort they put in and the result.

Sorry, but $50k/day compensates completely for any potential resentment. Especially coming from the real world, where stalkers and people showing up at your door and getting hold of your phone number because of a service or product you provided that drew a few nutjobs rarely comes with any compensation.

He should make all the money he can, laugh off the haters (whatever haters there are - I have only heard people talking either about how much they like the game, how frustrating the game is, or how nuts it is that it is making so much money for what it is). He could ride it out for a few weeks (or months, if he's lucky) and retire. Especially in his part of the world.

This artsy-fartsy turtle-head-back-in-shell thing is pretty crazy.

I have toiled for projects for many years which raked in far less than that annually.

I have seen people toil for many years for absolutely no return.

In both instances, subjected to "the internet is mean" behavior.

I will trade you making very little or making nothing and getting the worst of the internet in exchange for getting $50k/day for it, until the ride ends. In fact, for $50k/day, you can have my direct phone number. In fact, you can come to my house and piss on my carpet and blow smoke in my face all day long, for as long as the $50k keeps coming in.

Unless there is some sort of mental instability involved, I can not understand any developer - no matter how random or unexpected - saying "oh, the internet is so mean, I'm taking my stuff down and you can keep your $2,200/hr".

Also, can we dispense with qualifying everything with "the internet is mean"? this has been the case for decades. We don't need to preface every comment with it and qualify everything we ever say with a comment about how the internet is going to be mean to you for what you're going to say. We all know the internet. We've been here with it for a very long time. It is getting almost as obnoxious as when people begin every sentence with "to be honest", only it makes people come across even more insecure.

(I know this was a bit of a rant, but I've been realizing in recent months that a whole percentage of every podcast or article or show I ever watch that has anything to do with the internet can be attributed to the people on it whining about the mean internet or prepending forthcoming statements with how the internet is going to be mean to them for saying something.

Are we still going to be doing this in another twenty years or are we going to be over it?

If this is a marketing trick, that's some next level shit. But I'm not suggesting that it is.

He seems to be a normal guy, not a PR genius. But, yeah, "The game with 50,000,000 downloads will be taken off the app stores in the next 22 hours" is brilliant.

Well at least there'd be a next level to something then.

This very recent tweet from Dong seems to explain his motivation: https://twitter.com/dongatory/statuses/432096186313355264

other guy: "No problem, but you hate the success of Flappy Bird?"

Dong: "Not because of them but because how people use my game. They are overusing it."

And in about a month or two Flappy Bird fever will wear off and folks will move onto something else.

Don't turn down millions of dollars because people are doing what people do! Someone remind him of all the folks who have downloaded his game and stopped playing nearly immediately...,

I think it's about more than money for this guy

I respect his morals but the people over using the game are just going to move on to some other game and get addicted to it. If he feels bad about profiting from the game, he should donate it to a charity. That amount of money can do a lot of good.

And if a drug dealer decides to stop selling meth, you'd discourage him since addicts can just buy it down the block?

Note: I'm not saying Flappy Bird is like meth, but just pointing out your logic.

This might come as a shocker to many people on HN, but many people do not like money.

Yep they either have it already or they are fucking idiots. It's a fundamental lack of appreciation for good luck.

Dude common. You have to see it from his point of view. His money and fame aren't coming from a prestigious accomplishment. He probably doesn't want to be known for a flappy bird game for the rest of his life. Imagine being the guy who invented the turd scrubber brush next to the toilet. Everyone owns that brush but would you want to be known for it? Associated with it?

I have to say yes, I would have no problem with being known for inventing a toilet brush, or flappy bird. I'd be proud, even.

I know that people can have strangely fragile egos but the idea of being upset for being known for something, no matter how benign, is completely foreign to me.

? Then why is your account username "throwaway092834".

Because I have found the internet in general to be at times crude, ignorant and destructive. I don't want to concern myself with considering self-censorship to ensure self-preservation. Instead I chose to contribute anonymously so that I may challenge the status quo or speak truth to power without personal concern.

I assure you it has nothing to do with embarrassment. It's unfortunate, but speech often has very serious consequences.

Flappy bird can make it possible for him to fund his next adventure (or next 10), whatever he chooses that to be. He should think forward a bit more. It's extraordinarily rare to be in the position to take advantage of opportunities like that. What he'd be effectively doing is just handing the money off to Clumsy Bird instead. If he has any dreams for the future, he should view it as funding those dreams; which could be anything from a future game, to charity. Just my opinion obviously.

The disappointing part is that he apparently has such poor self-esteem, he thinks that he will not be able to create anything more popular than this game, even with all the money he's generating.

Regardless of what he builds, what industry he is in, there will always be people there to criticize. Why throw away opportunity that most people wish they had due to something that will occur regardless of the revenue?

Being a martyr only works in certain circumstances. This is not one of them.

There's nothing more to life than profit. Except maybe regretting your priorities on your deathbed, but whatevs, you won't be worried about it for long.

even if you actually hated money, it seems strange to turn your back on your passion because it came with a shit ton of money.

Oh yeah, becoming rich is so great. You can buy whatever you want for people you are not entirely sure are your real friends.

If you literally don't want the money, give it to charity.

Problem solved, get back to your passion.

I don't buy the premise of either of those hypotheticals.

Where is he turning his back on his passion? It doesn't sound like the way people are responding to Flappy Bird are the embodiment of his passion he wants. And his passion is in game dev, not an oddly specific passion for riding only the Flappy Bird app to success. Taking it down doesn't mean he can't build different games.

I also reject the idea that it was because of the money alone that he is taking the app down. Money wasn't the only byproduct of the success. Far be it for me to make assumptions, but it may be the "ruins my simple life" levels of baggage that came with the success of Flappy Bird.

My post was attempting to point out that he may have priorities in addition to profit, not that he is anti-money. If you meant to respond to the guy that is actually saying that the money alone could be the problem, perhaps you should move your post.

You and pikachu_is_cool are boggling my mind right now. The guy is having a moderately high amount of money coming in for him now, based on something he did out of passion. There is nothing wrong with money for stability. If you don't like it, give it to charity... or save for health issues, because we all now realize just how pricey a scrape can be in America.

It's not noble to waste opportunity like that. If he doesn't like money, he should take the money then give it away. A lot of poor people would kill to have that money to feed themselves and their families, or send their kid to school - if he feels so inclined he should take it and give it to them. If not, he's wasting a huge opportunity to either be very rich or very charitable out of some poorly thought-through righteousness.

So you advocate doing things you find morally objectionable while telling yourself that it is the right thing to do because you can give the money away afterwards? That sounds insane to me.

I think it's morally objectionable to waste a rare opportunity when one could just as easily channel that opportunity towards the benefits of others.

This really does not compute for me, so it's bad to stop ruining people's lives if in ruining their lives you could help other people's lives? What if the people addicted and raging over Flappy Bird are the same ones that you think should be helped?

This is a great opportunity for someone to make a (good) clone of this game and clean up!

But this game's concept has been around since forever already, also on other app store titles, so... idk.

Well, this is great news for anyone who's trying to clone the game.

He's averaging $50K per day from in-app ads according to an interview with The Verge:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5383708/flappy-bird-revenue...

AND he's in Vietnam. Huge sum of money.

If this is because of harassment then I feel really bad for him. The game may be super simple and silly but it shouldn't be ridiculed by those who are jealous of its luck and success.

My personal score is 102 and I appreciate the game for what it is.

There was a Polygon article on HN recently about how the audience has no idea what it wants. It used Flappy Bird as the example, mentioning how it was an overnight success, but repeatedly slammed it:

"Not only is the visual language of Flappy Bird almost entirely re-appropriated from early NES games, but it seems to be engineered and designed by someone still learning how to create games. There are frequent slowdowns and animation glitches in the Android version but, more importantly, Flappy Bird has absolutely no sense of what indie game developers call "feel."

The hitboxes are ridiculously large, which is the source of much of the game’s difficulty. The flapping mechanic, while serviceable, is entirely ordinary. It looks and feels like a game design student's first project in their intro to programming class."

In other words: "Well, this product is a turd, but it look how many idiots are buying it!" If that was your pet project, how would you feel? Imagine if every news article covering your game did so by giving you backhand compliments. It would crush you very, very quickly.

Agreed. I think many people (myself included, probably) aren't equipped to deal with constant streams of criticism and abuse.

It's a shame the internet had to react this way. The guy seems really humble and deserving of the success. But I think he chose happiness over the money, and I think that speaks of great integrity.

That's bad journalism, of course. If people are buying something in droves, and classical analysis suggests that that should be impossible, then there's something wrong with the analysis. A proper article would start with what we know -- "people love this game" -- and then try to figure out why.

You see the same backwards approach to journalism everywhere there's a scale in how much work things take to produce. Critics appreciate things with a complex process behind them. People, meanwhile, value mostly nostalgia and super-stimuli.

The wine most popular in blind taste-tests of people who haven't developed a "palate" for wine, is basically equivalent to grape juice with some vodka dumped into it. This isn't a bad thing! But critics hate it, because there's nothing to talk about there. It's grapey, and it's alcoholic, and that's all people really want. Until, that is, they're immersed into the whole culture of oaky this and tannins that, and start thinking about what went into the wine instead of just whether they want to drink a lot of it.

And because of this, critics generally don't serve the people. People want to find the best-tasting grapey alcohol. Critics, meanwhile, just want to talk about how long something aged in a barrel, and don't even have words to differentiate grapey alcohols.

As a side note, Dong has doubled his Twitter followers in one hour from 7000 to what now is nearly 16000. Whatever was his real intentions, he is receiving media attention which will most likely last even after he pulls out the game.

You could speculate that he is trying to make a name for himself, so that the upcoming games would make him a stable income. As an indie developer he should know the fact that Flappy Bird won't last long - for example, Rovio is making over half of its income from other physical brand items. I'm not saying you will see Flappy Bird soda next year, but the games Dong releases later will most likely gain more attention thanks to Flappy Bird and Twitter is a way to make sure that the fans will notice it.

You could speculate that he is trying to make a name for himself, so that the upcoming games would make him a stable income.

Are you speculating that, or are you suggesting that others should speculate that?

It's an expression, bro. Calm down.

"You could speculate that he is trying to make a name for himself, so that the upcoming games would make him a stable income."

$50k a day ... even if it only runs a couple weeks ... is beyond "stable" for Vietnam. As a reference-point, the average monthly income in that country is under $200.

There are lessons to be learned from this phenomenon in all fields (marketing, game dev, PR, etc...)

One thing I can empathize, and suspect is the root of this, is that as a young developer I'm sure he's scared out of his mind of legal repercussions. It's not easy scraping pennies one day, and then the next day checking your bank account and seeing money in there that you feel you didnt work for. It doesnt feel legal.

At the very least, I'm sure that weighs heavy on his mind.

It looks like a joke. I couldn't find any meaningful explanation for it.

This kind of helped me relate to why he's taking it down: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD-nzHy2DdU

I know it's a joke, but on the other hand, it's only funny because a lot of people identify with the sentiment.

So uhhh, now that he's out of the game can I make yet another SFCave clone and start making $50k/day then?

Good ole' sfcave. I've been playing that game since the palm pilot days. I remember upgrading my to a newer palm pilot and finding out that the game wasn't actually running full speed on my old greyscale palm. The android version is still fun.

SFCave is all mined out. The next big thing is obviously Gorillas.

Twitter is such a shit platform to convey ideas and motivations.

You know, that idea you just expressed fits nicely into 140 characters.

I should claim that that was my point, and that I was trying to be satirical.

However, the truth is that for discussing motivations and explaining things, such as Flappy Bird's demise, it really is not the ideal way to convey a message. Nuance and detail are gone on Twitter... and to your point, I was initially downvoted for my comment, presumably because I didn't give sufficient contribution to the converstaion.

If he hates the game so much, why did he release version 1.2 on the 7th Feb (two days ago!) with a new title screen, new UI, "new birds" and new backgrounds?

PURE CONJECTURE:

I'm an app developer and have been approached about doing deals to make it to the top where they would take a share of the revenue (and/or) charge an upfront fee.

So he could be taking it down because he doesn't want to keep paying 10-50% of his profits to some other company, when he realizes he can probably get another app to the top with his existing fame and userbase.

Would make a lot more sense than his claimed reasons.