Flappy Bird Part 2: Dong Nguyen Working On Game’s Sequel? Shutdown Viewed As Clever Marketing Tactic
The Flappy Bird saga continues and gamers all over the world should be ready for what could be a new twist to the game. According to game developer Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird is not yet a complete game and admitted that he might work on the sequel of the game.
Despite Nguyen already shutting down the no.1 game on Android and iOS, Flappy Bird has already made its mark in mobile gaming history. The game has become a worldwide phenomenon in just a matter of days, allowing the developer to harvest over 100K followers on Twitter and a cool $50,000 per day out of advertisements.
Nguyen, though he's irritated by the inconvenience the popularity of his game has brought to him, admitted that he felt proud to see his creation becoming a massive hit. He also thanked other Twitter followers for their good feedbacks on his game, despite the fact that Flappy Bird is not a complete game.
"I can call 'Flappy Bird' is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.," said Nguyen, who is a Hanoi-based independent game developer.
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Flappy Bird Part II in the Works
Nguyen described Flappy Bird as a mini game, and he planned to keep it as it is. The Vietnamese developer even said that he may work on a sequel of the game before announcing his plan to shut down it on Sunday.
"Flappy Bird is just a mini game. I would like keep it as it. Sequel may have," Nguyen tweeted as a response to one of his followers, who wanted a modification in his game.
According to Pau Tassi of Forbes, Nguyen's shutdown announcement might just be a clever tactics to further increase downloads of his game.
"But intentional or not, Nguyen's announcement of the removal of the game has turned into what could possibly be the most genius act of marketing in the history of the app market," Tassi stated.
"Yesterday afternoon, I checked to see if Flappy Bird had been removed early from the store for some reason. It hadn't, and had about 75,000 reviews, averaging around four stars. This morning, I woke up to check again, and see now that the game has 146,000 reviews. Unless I'm remembering the original number wrong, that sort of jump is astounding, and likely corresponds to a huge number of new downloads," he added.
Tassi surmised that Nguyen might be using the same marketing strategy Disney has employed over the years, which prompted customers to buy (or download) in volume before it runs out of stock or completely phased out in the market.
"What we're looking at here is "Disney vault" syndrome. Growing up, I always wondered why Disney bothered locking movies in "the vault," only to take them out for brief sales from time to time. By making the movies scarce, they would see a huge surge of sales before the movie was "locked away" and unavailable. Fans of the movie would make sure they had all the copies they wanted, or those who hadn't seen it would pick it up to not miss out."
"That's exactly what's happened here with Flappy Bird. Players are rushing out to finally download this game they've been hearing so much about since it's going to be gone within a day," Tassi added.
For more Flappy Bird update, read more at IBT