The lure of easy riches have clearly proven to be too much for the creator of the highly successful “Flappy Bird” game, Dong Nyugen, to resist, as it is reported the Vietnamese programmer means to return his creation to the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) app store in August. After earning $50,000 per day for several months from his Flappy Bird app, Mr. Dong took his brainchild down, vowing to never put it on the store again because of his moral objections to its addictive nature.
Wednesday, however, Mr. Dong declared his intention to issue what might be called “Flappy 2.0” in August in a statement to CNBC. This change of heart is probably due to the fact that other app makers continued to rake in the cash on such knockoffs as “Flappy Hitler” and “Floppy Bird,” rendering Mr. Dong’s noble gesture moot to the point of futility. The designer likely figures that if people are going to cash in on his idea regardless of whether or not he does, he might as well try to profit from the fad also.
The next iteration of Flappy Bird will be “non addictive” (which could mean anything from “empty words” to “gameplay is too easy to be interesting”), and will feature a multiplayer play mode. Whether the players work in cooperation or competition has not yet been revealed by Mr. Dong. The question, of course, is whether Flappy Bird’s day is already past, and if competitors have already destroyed the fad market briefly enjoyed by the Vietnamese designer.
Several of Flappy’s deadliest competitors include Flappy Bee, Splashy Fish, and the flying superhero toddler Ironpants. Even stiffer competition is coming from new fad game apps, such as Toilet Time, an app with toilet-themed mini-games supposed to be played while using the facilities. This app features such tasteful offerings as a game allowing the player to use a virtual stream of urine to cleanse fragments of virtual feces from a simulated toilet bowl, squashing cockroaches coming out of a drain, and so on. Toilet Time is enjoying the same prominence and cache that Flappy Bird once did before it was deliberately dethroned by its creator.
With a growing share of Apple’s (AAPL) revenue coming from software, services, and royalty revenues on the app store rather than hardware sales, the Cupertino firm will doubtless be glad to welcome Flappy Bird back with open arms. Regardless of whether Flappy Rebooted proves to be as popular as the first generation avian, Mr. Dong’s game helped launch a lucrative series of fad games that benefited both their creators and Apple itself.
