Update: Flappy Bird Creator Is Removing The Game From Stores

[Simalacrum]

Ummm I am sorry I thought that read $50k a day.... *reads again* Yep it did..... I would put up with ALOT MORE shit for $50k a day, sorry dude I think someone is threatening to sue you.

Money doesn't make people immune to threats and abuse, really. Dude sounds like he might even be suffering from depression. Sure, the money is nice, but it seems like this developer put his mental health above his physical wealth, which is something I can't really blame him for doing.

 

[Wackymon]

Huh...apparently Mario isn't the only game that Flappy Bird looks similar to.

I'll just say this: Poui Poui doesn't share the similar simple aesthetic of Flappy Bird, and surprisingly enough, doesn't involve going between things. The between part is where the difficulty comes from. Also, flappy bird doesn't insult me early on for failing. It just stands there, walking. And you'd be surprised what a simple change from holding the button to having to tap could do to completely alter the course of gameplay, along with how the game actually plays. However, I'll admit, I do think Flappy Bird is simply a extreme simplification of platformers down to their bare bones. Heck, look at angry birds: Not different at all, but simply changed the Aesthetics of a castle-destroying game. And then printed money.

The simplest thing I can really say is that the App Market is highly, highly, highly, highly, HIGHLY iterative.

However, there could be a very, very different reason as to why he's taking it down. Perhaps he simply intended to make it as a joke, and it went far, far overboard.

 

[misg]

There is only so many ways to through pixels together. I mean really what is the point it has similar elements to super Mario. Big deal, if this didn't sell well it would just be a "fan game" and people would like it. But because it's made him money people hate the guy and his game. Grow up get a life, is all I can think when I see this sort of story.

 

[x EvilErmine x]

I'm glad it's going, i very nearly threw my phone at the wall because of how frustratingly addictive the game is. Also so it rips off mario art assets...who cares. it's not like it's trying to be a mario clone, it's a completely different sort of game.

 

[O maestre]

the thing I don't get is the popularity this game has gotten, it is over a year old now. Guess people just love bird games.

 

[Random Argument Man]

Oh for *** sake? I'd like to go one month?ONE MONTH without someone screaming death threats for a small pathetic reason. If the NSA is spying on us with the Internet, might as well do something useful with it other than being dicks about it.

 

[Brian Tams]

All you had to do, man, was to use something other than the pipes. That was all you had to do!!!

I mean, the game was atrocious, but 50K a day? If I made 50K a game for owning the rights to a terrible app game, I will take it all day long for that much.

Watch him reskin the game and rerelease it as something else.

 

[critanime]

The art style is the only thing similar, so it's kind of hard to see it as trying to "emulate" Mario.

You mean besides the fact that those are clearly Mario-style pipes with a slight art style tweak, the bird being a hybrid of earlier Mario enemies in the same style as those games, and the backgrounds being very VERY similar to those of classic Mario 2D sid-escrollers, right?

Because it's pretty darn obvious where he got those assets from. I mean, get on Google, do a search, people have done the comparisons, and there's pretty much no question whatsoever as to where the choice of style came from. He adjusted them slightly, sure (which is probably the only reason Nintendo didn't immediately try to bust him, because it's harder to attack "similar" in court than it is to attack a direct asset ripoff), but you'd have to be blind not to see the resemblance. It's pretty obvious the guy was capitalizing on the look of those assets to help sell the game.

Again, not that this is rationalizing the shit biscuits on the internet who always take it too far with threats and the like. But criticizing him for his choice of art assets is fair game, AFAIC, given that the guy COULD have been creative with his game and been fine, and instead he chose to copy/paste Mario assets and then tweak them slightly so as to avoid an easy lawsuit from Nintendo. I won't rationalize the people attacking him, but I won't sympathize with him for being lazy, either.

And this is why it's all so laughable.

 

[Jmp_man]

-snip-

I'm pretty sure that he didn't expect the game to be a success and conversely didn't expect to have a chance of being "gunned down" by lawyers. Besides... if you're just making a quick game for fun and put it on the app store for free do you really think that anyone would really TRY to make a game with original graphics? Heck, there are 100's of games out there that use assets from tons of different games. A quick 2 second search on ANY flash game website can prove that.

 

[Britpoint]

I find it funny how easily one can gain sympathy is by claiming to receive death threats.Does this guy have any proof of these so called threats?If not then all this white knighting is kind of pointless.

You can find the proof yourself. Just go onto twitter and search from terms like "@dongatory kill". Of the first ten results I found three explicitly said "I will find you and kill you" and two more told him to kill himself.

 

[Britpoint]

I find it funny how easily one can gain sympathy is by claiming to receive death threats.Does this guy have any proof of these so called threats?If not then all this white knighting is kind of pointless.

You can find the proof yourself. Just go onto twitter and search from terms like "@dongatory kill". Of the first ten results I found three explicitly said "I will find you and kill you" and two more told him to kill himself.

Those aren't threats,a threat is something that puts you in immediate danger.If those people knew where the guy lived and were stalking/sending violent calls to his friends and family then that would be a threat.People really need to learn the differences between people talking shit on the internet and actual threatening behaviour because this is getting old.

What's getting old is people who don't take harassment seriously because 'it's just talking shit on the internet'. To YOU that's all it is, but then you're not receiving hundreds of them, are you?

 

[PunkRex]

If the guy spent just a fraction of the money he's made on hiring an art director for just a few hours i'm sure they could make a simple yet original look for the game, then all those perfectic little anons couldn't say shit.

I played the game and yeah, it was freaking annoying, but still fun.

The other night one of my mates asked us 'Hey, you lot played Flappy Bird? It's kinda crap but still kinda fun', 10 minutes later everyone in the room was playing it, it was jokes rubbing your high score in peeps faces. One of my mates bagged 14 or something and we all chewed him out for it, it was just a fun little experience.

People on the interent, why even!?

Huh...apparently Mario isn't the only game that Flappy Bird looks similar to.

Oh, well, if he riped it off then I have no sympathy for him.

 

[Hero of Lime]

I wouldn't take it down. At the end of the day, a lot of people "hate" you, but you have 50 thousand dollars more than they do, he wins by default. I won't defend the game, but if people are like something most of us would deem unworthy, that's just how it is I suppose.

Plus, we all know death threats on the internet are probably the most empty threats imaginable.

Though I do worry that some very uninformed people will think that Mario copied the green pipes from Flappy Bird, that would be a sad future indeed. :/

 

[Frozengale]

Huh...apparently Mario isn't the only game that Flappy Bird looks similar to.

I've played both of these games. They are similar in many respects but they do play very differently.

Flappy Bird is about avoiding all obstacles, the bird moves at a constant x-velocity but has a widely varying y-velocity that can dip dramatically. Everything about the movement is erratic and hard to control.

This other game is not about avoiding obstacles but about staying ahead of the screen crawl. Hitting an obstacle only impedes progress it does not stop it. There are power-ups and power-downs that change the game slightly. Screen crawl is constantly getting faster. The bird moves at a constant x-velocity and the y-velocity remains fairly constant when going down or up. It is incredibly easy to control.

Sure they have similarities but these games play very differently. He may have stole the look of the bird, but he hardly stole the game.

I really don't see why people are hating on him so much. He made a game. It's not incredibly inventive, it's slightly derivative, but it isn't a clone. It emulates the style of assets from other games, but it gives them their own twist. And that is basically what the entire game is. It's his own twist on a type of game that has been around for years. And guess what the twist makes it more fun then all the stuff that it is derivative of. Almost every game you have ever played is a derivative of another. Taking an established style of game and playing with the mechanics to give it your own style is basically what the past 20 years of gaming have been.

 

[emeraldrafael]

I'd say when youre making a starting salary in my job a day you should deal with criticisms, but then again I can understand not wanting to constantly open your email and see hate mail.

... not to mention I have little to no sympathy for people bitching about a game they didnt even have to buy complaining its hard rather than just deleting it. And the whole one million moms sending death threats to a disney stay under 10 because the show made a passing reference to a same sex couple parents has left a bad taste in my mouth for pointless consumer bitching.

 

[emeraldrafael]

... Celebrities and politicians are harrassed constantly yet you don't see them ***** about and trying to make a sob story out of it now do you? ...

actually yes, you do. search up on the huffington and you have three stories of celebrities stating they are disturbed or consulting safety measures because of death threats. as I said above one million moms all started death threats to an 5 year old on disney an her mother felt she needed to intervene and is very disturbed and worried over it. you just don't hear about it because its people like who and others who in this age say "oh its not a big deal its the internet."

though if you want to try it yourself, you can always see if your head of country/state/representative/any political person or celebrity has a social networking account and go on there several times saying you're going to kill them and not leave any clue you're joking and see how seriously they take it. I imagine they're not just going to laugh it off.

 

[emeraldrafael]

... Celebrities and politicians are harrassed constantly yet you don't see them ***** about and trying to make a sob story out of it now do you? ...

actually yes, you do. search up on the huffington and you have three stories of celebrities stating they are disturbed or consulting safety measures because of death threats. as I said above one million moms all started death threats to an 5 year old on disney an her mother felt she needed to intervene and is very disturbed and worried over it. you just don't hear about it because its people like who and others who in this age say "oh its not a big deal its the internet."

though if you want to try it yourself, you can always see if your head of country/state/representative/any political person or celebrity has a social networking account and go on there several times saying you're going to kill them and not leave any clue you're joking and see how seriously they take it. I imagine they're not just going to laugh it off.

People like me?For your information I take actual death threats seriously.People saying mean things over the internet does not equal threating someone's life.Until someone tries to kill a game dev then their cries of being threatened are just a result of being mentally and emotionally weak.

I'm pretty sure more than once someone said the worlds I will kill you <url=http://www.businessinsider.com/flappy-bird-death-threats-2014-2>here for various reasons, so by your logic that you take death threats seriously then these should be too. just because no one's made an attempt yet doesnt mean they can't fear for their safety. Or is it just because this is over the internet, rather than saying 20 years ago writing a letter to someone and mailing from a business giving them a death threat? cause that's pretty anonymous too, and yes, they would do that for you if you asked.

 

[klaynexas3]

The art style is the only thing similar, so it's kind of hard to see it as trying to "emulate" Mario.

You mean besides the fact that those are clearly Mario-style pipes with a slight art style tweak, the bird being a hybrid of earlier Mario enemies in the same style as those games, and the backgrounds being very VERY similar to those of classic Mario 2D sid-escrollers, right?

Because it's pretty darn obvious where he got those assets from. I mean, get on Google, do a search, people have done the comparisons, and there's pretty much no question whatsoever as to where the choice of style came from. He adjusted them slightly, sure (which is probably the only reason Nintendo didn't immediately try to bust him, because it's harder to attack "similar" in court than it is to attack a direct asset ripoff), but you'd have to be blind not to see the resemblance. It's pretty obvious the guy was capitalizing on the look of those assets to help sell the game.

Not to mention, as others have pointed out earlier in this thread, he's also arguably ripped off of other sources to create this game in the first place. So....no, sorry, won't feel sorry for a guy whose troubles are self-inflicted due to his own lazy decisions when making his game.

Again, not that this is rationalizing the shit biscuits on the internet who always take it too far with threats and the like. But criticizing him for his choice of art assets is fair game, AFAIC, given that the guy COULD have been creative with his game and been fine, and instead he chose to copy/paste Mario assets and then tweak them slightly so as to avoid an easy lawsuit from Nintendo. I won't rationalize the people attacking him, but I won't sympathize with him for being lazy, either.

Coming from you, I honestly have no idea how you are able to say this considering you're the guy that went around insulting people because they may have not liked the aesthetic choice of a game, calling them childish for cticizing a game's art style. Have some consistency man.

And I never said you had to be sorry for the guy; he clearly airlifted plenty of the textures, I know that, I'm only saying the art wasn't what made the gameplay, so while the look might be that of Nintendo the play is clearly anything but. Yeah he deserves some critisim, yeah he's a lazy fuck, my only point was that it's gameplay was pretty damn far from Mario, that's all I'm saying.

 

[emeraldrafael]

... Celebrities and politicians are harrassed constantly yet you don't see them ***** about and trying to make a sob story out of it now do you? ...

actually yes, you do. search up on the huffington and you have three stories of celebrities stating they are disturbed or consulting safety measures because of death threats. as I said above one million moms all started death threats to an 5 year old on disney an her mother felt she needed to intervene and is very disturbed and worried over it. you just don't hear about it because its people like who and others who in this age say "oh its not a big deal its the internet."

though if you want to try it yourself, you can always see if your head of country/state/representative/any political person or celebrity has a social networking account and go on there several times saying you're going to kill them and not leave any clue you're joking and see how seriously they take it. I imagine they're not just going to laugh it off.

People like me?For your information I take actual death threats seriously.People saying mean things over the internet does not equal threating someone's life.Until someone tries to kill a game dev then their cries of being threatened are just a result of being mentally and emotionally weak.

I'm pretty sure more than once someone said the worlds I will kill you <url=http://www.businessinsider.com/flappy-bird-death-threats-2014-2>here for various reasons, so by your logic that you take death threats seriously then these should be too. just because no one's made an attempt yet doesnt mean they can't fear for their safety. Or is it just because this is over the internet, rather than saying 20 years ago writing a letter to someone and mailing from a business giving them a death threat? cause that's pretty anonymous too, and yes, they would do that for you if you asked.

Have you ever played a multiplayer game like COD?If so then you would know people threaten to kill others all the time yet nobody takes it seriously because what are they going to do?

See this is what I'm talking about when I said earlier that people need to learn the difference of saying mean things over the internet and actual death threats.If someone posted a video threatening to bomb a school and they showed off components used for bomb making then that's a threat.

This idiocy of "people saying mean things over the internet = people being threatened" crossed the line when a teen was arrested for talking smack while playing a online game and is now serving a lengthy prison setence.

Seriously either game devs need to toughen up or they need to find a new line of work if reading mean things is enough for them to be worried for their lives.

because its just so nice and easy when all death threats are meticulously laid out and planned and presented so that everyone knows they should take those ones seriously. because no one has ever made an off handed sounding death threat and followed through with them.

 

[emeraldrafael]

...

Have you ever played a multiplayer game like COD?If so then you would know people threaten to kill others all the time yet nobody takes it seriously because what are they going to do?

See this is what I'm talking about when I said earlier that people need to learn the difference of saying mean things over the internet and actual death threats.If someone posted a video threatening to bomb a school and they showed off components used for bomb making then that's a threat.

This idiocy of "people saying mean things over the internet = people being threatened" crossed the line when a teen was arrested for talking smack while playing a online game and is now serving a lengthy prison setence.

Seriously either game devs need to toughen up or they need to find a new line of work if reading mean things is enough for them to be worried for their lives.[/quote]

because its just so nice and easy when all death threats are meticulously laid out and planned and presented so that everyone knows they should take those ones seriously. because no one has ever made an off handed sounding death threat and followed through with them.[/quote]Again..show me a article of where a game dev was killed and I'll take those threats seriously.You sound like the type of person who would support the arrest and imprisoning of that teen I mentioned just because he made a sarcastic remark about blowing people up.[/quote]

no I thought that was ridiculous. However it says no where here that the dev is pushing charges or any legal action against the claims so I don't see anything wrong with taking down something when its getting you hatemail after you've laready made all the money you ever need off of it. And I dont know why you keep coming back to game devs, like it has to happen to them for it to be real. Like we haven't seen people be crazy and do this to average every day joes and janes. If you feel youre safety is threatened you have a right to act in appropriate ways to feel safe again.