Update: Flappy Bird-Laden Devices Selling for $80,500 Online

[Dark Knifer]

Or you could just download it or a flash game that has the exact same mechanics that existed many years before that's sure to exist.

Or buy a big tv and snort drugs off it. Anything else at all.

These people do not deserve money.

Edit:

I'm pretty sure those are joke bids anyway.

You can do that? Well that changes things then.

 

[Chessrook44]

Didn't he remove the game because people were sending death threats or the like at him?

Christ, dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.

 

[AlwaysPractical]

Joke's on the iPhone users, Android users can just download the APK from literally everywhere on the internet.

In all seriousness: this is just depressing. Reading through those tweets is just horrible, so much vile stuff being spewed at him, people threatening him left, right and centre. Along with the suicide threats it just goes to show that people are horrible.

 

[frobalt]

The stupidity of this amazes me!

First of all, is flappy birds really so good a game that it's worth threatening to kill someone over?

Secondly, if the game meant that much to those people, they should have already downloaded it and have it on their phones.

Seriously, people are fucking stupid.

What makes this even worse is just how many games there probably are that have the same basic premise.


I am curious what made it so popular though: Is it the competitive aspect?

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

Part of me really wants there to be just MASSIVE group suicides with bloody notes covered with scrawled images of the bird. BBC news will report it in utter bewilderment, and the death toll will rise and rise.

Soon the world population will drop under 1 million as the people's anguished cries are cut short.

The apocalypse is upon us, and it began with Flappy Bird.

Seriously though, I had never heard a peep (ha) about this damn game until the shitstorm had already commenced. Now, it really feels like some kind of neo-Monty Python bit. Its absurd to the point of being truly offensive now.

 

[Schadrach]

You could pay a developer in India a quarter of that to make your own personal copy of the game. Hell, I'd do it for a couple of grand - it's half a day's work.

You're being a bit unrealistic there. Half a day's work to write the core engine maybe, but then you've got maybe a day for new art (there isn't a lot of it, but it still needs made, and decent artists tend to be a bit obsessive), and another day or two for debugging (especially your map generator, because you know that thing is going to have at least one game-breaking bug that creates impossible to pass arrangements), and then another day or two for difficulty tweaks.

I'd call it about a week (to give some slack for the unexpected, because you *never* plan for everything) if I already had an artist on hand or could do my own art.

 

[AstaresPanda]

this shit has escalated fast, ive only just heard of this flapy birds which looked very mario rip off to me and nothing great just a simple and shit yet hard game coz it was shit.

 

[VanQ]

Does anyone else notice that it's like 80% women making these death threats? Could you imagine the uproar if this was a bunch of men throwing death threats at a female developer? I certainly hope I'm not the only one that's noticing the absolute irony that this situation is right now.

 

[Strazdas]

wow, people going mad over the phone game that was done before multiple times. besides, its not like you cant just pirate it if your willing to murder somone for it you know. that may be less illegal than murder. just a thought.

 

[hickwarrior]

Does anyone else notice that it's like 80% women making these death threats? Could you imagine the uproar if this was a bunch of men throwing death threats at a female developer? I certainly hope I'm not the only one that's noticing the absolute irony that this situation is right now.

I didn't notice that anywhere. Then again, I live in my own bubble of comfort + 1. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Though anyone slinging death threats should be slammed for it. In the slammer... Time to slip back into my bubble of comfort + 1 and listen to nights: lucid dreams. Maybe this will all blow away that way.

 

[truckspond]

I wonder what I could get for that iPad I downloaded it to...

 

[Alleged_Alec]

Okay. Everyone who threatened with murder or suicide: just kill yourself. If you're being such an asshole about this you don't deserve to be on this earth.

 

[DeadProxy]

I wonder what I could get for that iPad I downloaded it to...

Take advantage of the situation while you can, this kind of stupid doesn't come around all that often. Just slap a price sticker on it and put it up there, in big shiny letters, that you got the stupid game on the thing.

 

[Flatfrog]

You could pay a developer in India a quarter of that to make your own personal copy of the game. Hell, I'd do it for a couple of grand - it's half a day's work.

You're being a bit unrealistic there. Half a day's work to write the core engine maybe, but then you've got maybe a day for new art (there isn't a lot of it, but it still needs made, and decent artists tend to be a bit obsessive), and another day or two for debugging (especially your map generator, because you know that thing is going to have at least one game-breaking bug that creates impossible to pass arrangements), and then another day or two for difficulty tweaks.

I'd call it about a week (to give some slack for the unexpected, because you *never* plan for everything) if I already had an artist on hand or could do my own art.

To develop it from scratch, maybe. To copy this one, I think that's overkill. The gameplay coding itself is pretty much minimal - falling under gravity and jumping on a tap is maybe half an hour's coding maximum! Collision detection and random placement of pipes maybe another hour or so. Another hour to tweak the speed and other settings; the surrounding infrastructure (menus, high scores etc) adds on another hour or two. Ripping off the assets is easy (half an hour with a screen grab and Photoshop), find a few free sound effects and you're pretty much done. I don't think half a day is really that unreasonable, but okay, a day max.

As it happens, I already made pretty much exactly this game for a birthday present for my daughter a few years ago - mine was a Primeval-themed game where you steered a flying lizard through an office building full of filing cabinets and ceiling fans, and I think it did take me about a day - maybe a bit longer because I had to do some 3d modelling.

 

[Signa]

This is why I never take death-threats seriously. I'm more appalled when others do take them seriously.

 

[RyQ_TMC]

Huh. I've never played Flappy Bird, but from what I've read about it when my fb feed suddenly exploded with comments about it, I gathered it's simply "that game". You know, that one flash game where you fly a helicopter or a spaceship through a tunnel. It flies up if you press a key, falls down if you let go.

That one flash game that gets made and posted at some corner of the Internet about twice a week.

I might of course be completely wrong and Flappy Bird is a brilliant little game, masterfully combining casual and hardcore gamers into one happy crowd and bringing a breath of fresh air into the scene.

Then again, Angry Birds wasn't a new concept either. So maybe death threats are understandable. Not justifiable, not excusable, but understandable.

It's a force of nature, guys.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I'm pretty sure those are joke bids anyway.

Yes but the fun thing about joke bids is that it might convince some people that it's worth more then it is. Thus someone might be dumb enough to follow through with it.

Oh would you look at that. My phone is suddenly up for sale on Ebay.

I find myself suddenly wishing I hadn't deleted it a few hours after downloading it. I could upgrade to a much nicer phone this way, dangit XD

Don't even have to get greedy, just put my $50 prepaid phone up there for $150 or $200, somebody would grab it.

 

[Flatfrog]

I'd call it about a week (to give some slack for the unexpected, because you *never* plan for everything) if I already had an artist on hand or could do my own art.

Flappy Bird made in an hour from scratch (okay, a hell of a lot faster than I could do it, but still!)

 

[CriticalMiss]

Didn't he remove the game because people were sending death threats or the like at him?

Christ, dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.

Yeah, he's basically going to get abuse whatever happens. If he released a brand new version of the game with original gameplay and artwork that was twenty times better than anything else he'd get death threats for 'ruining the classic'.

Welcome to the internet, where there is a death threat for every occasion!