The most addicting game to ever hit the App Store will make its triumphant return in August. Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen tells CNBC that he has a new version in the works, but this time it won’t be as addictive.
Flappy Bird’s official sequel will have a new multiplayer element that Nguyen says will make it less addictive than the previous version, which saw kids flapping until the late hours of the night to rack up high scores. Nguyen reaffirms that he is working on other games, including one where a man jumps from building to building—the idea sounds a lot like Canabalt if you ask me.
Nguyen pulled Flappy Bird from the App Store at the height of its popularity in February. In-app ads were earning the Vietnamese developer more than 50K per day at the time, but he ended buckling under the spotlight. “I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine,” he said at the time in broken English. “But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.”
A couple of months ago, Nguyen was profiled by Rolling Stone. In the interview, he revealed that he wasn’t done making games, but needed to take a break.
All of Nguyen’s games are cleverly designed to have very, very simple gameplay and a fiendishly difficult learning curve. Players would fail quickly but couldn’t stop playing thanks to the singularly addictive style, which is what Dong has said he felt guilty about.
An entire ecosystem of knockoffs and Flappy Bird-inspired titles have spawned in the App Store since the original disappeared. At one point, a third of new games submitted to the App Store were Flappy Bird clones. There is clearly still a market out there for the repetitive, mindless kind of games Flappy Bird exemplified so well.
If you missed out on downloading Flappy Bird before it was yanked, our video review will show you all the flappy-goodness coming your way in two months:
Source: CNBC
