The much loved game that made everyone want more is coming back. App creator Dong Nguyen today announced plans to return Flappy Bird to the App Store in August in a new interview with CNBC’s Kelly Evans. According to Nguyen, the new version of Flappy Bird will include multiplayer features that are “less addictive.”
Back in February, Nguyen deleted Flappy Bird from the App Store after it became massively popular, mainly for the attention he was receiving. “Please give me peace,” he tweeted just a week before removing the app from the App Store. At the summit of its popularity, the game was generating approximately $50,000 per day in revenue from in-app ads, causing a media frenzy.
In a March interview with Rolling Stone, Nguyen confessed that the reason he pulled the app was because of the overwhelming amount of attention he gained from the media, but also because of threatening messages he received from Flappy Bird players about the game’s addictiveness. One woman told him he was “distracting the children of the world.”
Nguyen noted that he had trouble in school in his own youth because of an addiction to video games, and admitted to feeling guilty that Flappy Bird was an addictive product.
After Flappy Bird was removed from the App Store, hundreds of similar flooded the App Store as developers attempted to clone some of Nguyen’s success, and at one point towards the end of February, one-third of new games released over a 24-hour period were heavily influenced by Flappy Bird.
Though the Flappy Bird cloning has died down in recent weeks, fans will likely welcome the return of the original game. As Nguyen has said, “People can clone the app because of its simplicity, but they will never make another Flappy Bird.” While Nyugen has mentioned multiplayer as one new aspect of the game, it is unclear how he plans to make it “less addictive.”
During today’s interview, Nguyen also relayed some details about his next game, which is said to be a jumping game where players control a character that leaps from building to building.
