Flappy Bird: Latest Trend in Mobile Gaming

If you have never heard of Flappy Bird then I must ask you this – Have you been living under a rock?! Why it’s the latest “thing” going on right now? It’s a game where you have to pass through a set of gaps in between two pipes. Your score is determined by the number of pips you can pass though before you hit one of them, and you can rest assure you will hit one soon.

Flappy Bird - not a big hit at launch, but still famous

The Flappy Bird game was originally released on May 24^th 2013 but no one knew it existed until January 2014 when it suddenly topped the Free Apps chart in both the US and the Chinese App Stores. Google Play Store only got the game after the 30^th of January but “The Verge“(an American technology news and media network) reported that the game was earning about $50,000 a day from in-game advertising.

After Dong Nguyen removed the game from both the Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store, he claimed that he created the game to be played for a few minutes a day, but since it has turned into an addiction – he had to take it down. He also claimed that there were no legal issues with the game, but I am not so sure about that because the game does steal most of the textures from the well know game “Mario.”

How do you make a game popular these days? Simple – you take it down from the App Store

By taking down the Flappy Bird game the creator made it even more popular. Two well known news sites - “The Guardian” and “The Times” have been flooded with searches for Flappy Bird. We can easily see the dramatic effect taking down the game had on its popularity via Google Trends.

Now, the question on everyone’s mind is why did the game suddenly become popular to such an extent that the creator had to take it down? It was lying under the dormant for almost a year – completely unheard of and all of sudden – every smartphone had the game. The game is well known for its difficulty and sometimes passing through even two pipes can be a nightmare. This is made even worse by the fact that the game isn’t 100% flawless as the obstacles are slightly bigger than they appear to be.

Flappy Bird – a trending game packed with flaws

People rage most of the time because they find themselves going through a lot of the gaps in between the pipes without any difficulty and then suddenly hit an invisible extension of a pipe. While the game was slowly gaining popularity during January of this year, YouTube’s most subscribed Youtuber, “pewdiepie,” decided to make one of his gameplay videos about this game.

The video has a little short of 13.5 million views right now so it’s safe to say a lot of people who didn’t know about the game have in fact heard of it from him, but then again you can’t blame him for making it go viral because it was already popular before he posted a video about it.

Since its rise to fame, a lot of Flappy Bird clones have appeared and a few of them have been identified to have malware in them. So if you plan on downloading the Flappy Bird game and have no in-depth knowledge about your smartphone, then I suggest you go for one of the top rated clones with a good review because you will not find the original game anymore.

Author Bio: The article is contributed by a regular writer and contributor Alfred Stallion. He is an ordinary guy as others, but with extraordinary passion for technology and gadgets. Also he writes for an online gaming site Cooking Games 365.