Flappy Bird will be returning to the App Store

“It was the game that got fans in a flap when it was suddenly pulled from Apple and Google’s app stores in February.

However, the Vietnamese Hanoi-based developer now appears to have had a change of heart announcing on Twitter Flappy Bird will return – ‘but not soon.’”

Flappy Bird was released back in May last year for iOS, and later January this year for Android. In the game you control a small bird, the aim is to tap the screen to make the bird flap up, to get through gaps in pipes, and repeat to get past as many as you can before you hit one.

Pretty simple, as game concepts go. The game was both praised and hated for its difficulty, which in turn seemed to make it that much more addicting. With help from the Internet sites such as reddit, and youtube bloggers, the game went viral in a big way.

By February this year the game had been downloaded by more than 50 million people, to put that into perspective as of 2012 just over 60 million people live in the UK itself. The creator of the game, a Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen is said to have been receiving around £30,000 per day just from ad revenue.

With the success of Flappy Bird, soon the app store began to be flooded with clones of the game ranging from the obvious like flappy fish and flappy chicken, to the stranger such as a MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) version of the game, a text based adventure version of the game, to one using braille characters. People were even building electronic flappy bird machines from cardboard boxes, it seemed the Internet was obsessed with Flappy Bird.

It was on the 8^th of February that Dong Nguyen announced over twitter he would be pulling the game from both the App Store and Google Play. His reasons for such were that Flappy Bird had ruined his simple life, and he hated how people were overusing the game.

Even with the apps removal, the story didn’t end there. Not a few days after, people began trying to sell phones for 2-3 times their retail value, just from the fact they had flappy bird installed on them. We don’t know whether anyone actually bought these phones, but considering how addicted some people seemed to get to the game, we wouldn’t be surprised.

So this brings us back to the news that Flappy Bird will be returning to the App Store. While it could lead to a repeat of its success, we personally think the craze has come and gone. We’d say we should more be worried of the three new games Dong announced are on the way. Whatever happens we’ll be interested to see if he can reproduce the same success he had with Flappy Bird.

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