The Psychology of Dong Nguyen, Creator Of Flappy Bird

By Edoardo Moreni - March, 21st 2014

The more we look at how Dong Nguyen is behaving, the more we don’t really understand anything about his creations. Dong is the guy who created Flappy Bird, the simplest game on earth, which is making more than $50,000 a day. He suddenly took the game off the Apple Store and Google Play. There is no sense in what he did and we are still trying to figure out why he did it.

He probably was seeking attention, because there is nothing that can keep a human being away from money. When you see that something you have created is making a lot of money and you can improve it day by day, just by doing this for life, there is no reason to stop it. If you then want to get press coverage and double your revenues for the next years, you take the game off the internet.

What is really strange about the figure of Dong Nguyen is the way he has been tweeting in the past days. After having stopped tweeting for a month, this guy has suddenly turned active replying to questions that his fans were making. It seemed like the guy took a 30 days break from the outside world, released a couple of interviews and then got back into our world (the internet).

The good news is that we are going to see Flappy Bird again, but in another form. Why? There is no answer to this question, but what we can understand is that this guy didn’t hate the game and didn’t even want to stop developing games. Making Flappy Bird unavailable was one of the best marketing moves of the last years and he knows that if he comes back he’ll have tripled the momentum he had before shutting the game down.

Although making money seems to be the best and most obvious explanation to what happened, it’s also true that being an indie game developer is not something you are going to like. Hours of coding, closed in your world, where perfection needs to be achieved by a single man can be really stressful. As the documentary “Indie Game”, which has recorded and documented the development of three games, shows this kind of life is not for someone who’s looking for stability. You are constantly under pressure, money less and there is no one that can support you apart from your family. If you struggle developing your game, you have any technical problem, you can rely only on your brain.

If you don’t have trust in what you are doing and patience, it might be the worst thing you have ever done. It might have happened to Dong Nguyen, who suddenly exploded and decided to take a long break before getting involved in any other game; but the truth is, as we have already said, he was in a position where he could have hired the best developers in the world, use what he was making in 10 days, and make them develop and update Flappy Bird. We are not talking about a game such as Angry Birds, that needs new levels and a team of people, the simplicity of Flappy Bird, which is the reason why it was so successful, can be implemented by anyone.

Dong is coming back, with another hit, probably in the next months. Even though the game is not available anymore, he’s still making money through the past downloads that amount to millions. The guy didn’t take the game down as soon as he announced it, he did it after he got world wide press coverage. The fact he’s still getting coverage, even from us, is a once in a lifetime opportunity for him and his next games. With more than 170k followers on Twitter, he’s definitely coming back, because opportunities and money are in front of him, he just needs to grab them.