The Geniality Behind Flappy Bird

By Edoardo Moreni - February, 9th 2014

The gaming industry has massively increased in the past years due to new platforms that have arisen such as iOS or Android, but we never thought that the simplest game ever created could make $50,000 a day in ads. These are incredible figures for a solo developer that probably was just thinking about making a game to waste his time and not other people’s.

Dong Nguyen is the indie game developer based in Hanoi, Vietnam, who developed Flappy Bird. The game that was originally released in May 2013 on iPhone 5, it soon was a success and became also available on Google Play. The objective of the games is to make a bird fly without hitting obstacles, in the case of the game, pipes. It has always reminded me Super Mario, an old game developed by Nintendo on Game Boy.

Although the guy is making enough to live as a king for the next forty years, this is not what makes it ingenious. The remarkable thing about this game is that Dong is planning to retire it from the market in the next few hours. Why?

I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.

— Dong Nguyen (@dongatory) February 8, 2026

 

Apparently the guy is in the middle of a crisis. Making millions is not for everyone and sometimes people can’t handle the pressure or distributing a product to million of people who are ready to judge you. Is this the reason why he’s taking it down? Nope. We are not probably in the guy’s mind, but this whole thing doesn’t make sense at all.

Even if you can’t handle the pressure, you hire someone who can update it for you. With five days of revenues, the guy can hire the best iOS and Android developer on the market and make a profit for the other 360 days. If we look at the numbers, we see a game who is growing and getting a massive amount of momentum that can boost the developer’s fame, who can easily release new games and make them a success.

What if you announce to take it down to get more press? With a single tweet, the developer is all over the news and I guess the downloads have increased by 1000% in a single day. What if you don’t take the game down? Press is going to kill you, but the millions of downloads and the revenues that have doubled in a single day won’t disappear. With a single move you have sorted your life.

Is this what the indie game developer wants to do? We can’t say it. The other scenario, if the game is really taken down, will make him richer in any case. He didn’t say he couldn’t develop games anymore, he said he was going to take this one down, which means that even if he takes it down, these last days have given him enough momentum to make his next games a success.

The guy is smart and we have probably been fooled by his strategy. There aren’t any other explanations, but there is only one that shows us the geniality of a developer based in Vietnam. He surely knows how to sell and that’s why we think it’s worth writing about him, even though this article he’s going to make him richer. Learning how to sell things is not easy and being covered by the ninety percent of the tech journalists out there is what every entrepreneur dreams.

If you want to learn how to sell, you will have to understand how to bluff first.