I know, if I don’t like the news, I should just turn it off and ignore it. But just like all press an iPhone with a bigger screen got, I can’t believe how much press the guy behind Flappy Bird is getting for simply saying he’s going to pull the game from the app stores. In the big picture of life, a game not being available doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. And we’re not talking about removing an iconic game from history like Super Mario Brothers or Halo which are cult franchises. We’re simply saying an inexpensive mobile game that is highly addictive (I’m assuming it is since I never played the game) won’t be around anymore. I know the press is trying to speculate why Dong Nguyen is pulling the game when it’s been such a success generating $50K a day in revenue from ads. Ultimately, I don’t really care why he’s pulling the game, it could range form the most genius marketing move to the fact that he just doesn’t want to support it anymore. Or maybe Rovio is holding his family hostage and making him take down the game – who knows (but at least a hostage situation seems more news-worthy). Mobile platforms and app stores have made the distribution and consumption of digital content (games, apps, music, movies, etc) so easy and simply that anyone can become a digital content creator and more important, anyone can become the next Dong Nguyen and create the next smash-hit game with hard-work and a lot of luck (I have to caveat a lot of luck because the Internet is not always fair and the best product can and will be beat by the product that has a better marketing strategy and gets in front of the right people). So why am I writing all this? Good question… I don’t think I have a good reason… maybe I’m just bitter that something so innocuous gets so much attention… maybe I’m jealous and wish I was his position… maybe I’m just bored on a Sunday morning and got irritated with all the top stories on every Tech site I went to was about this Flappy Bird game… yeah, that’s it… I was hoping for something for interesting…
On a side note, I have to mention Ingress as a really interesting location-based game of capture the flag that’s owned by Google and played world-wide. I’ve been playing it a little bit at a time and it’s getting pretty addictive and I find myself pulling out my phone in random places to see if there’s anything I can capture around me for my team. I’ll have to do another write-up on the game, but just thought I would mention it since this was a post about addictive mobile games… not to mention, I wanted to end on a positive note rather than a negative note.