The dude was raking in $50,000/day. You don't just pull the plug on something doing that because of really mean and aggressive online comments, do you...?
> As news hit of how much money Nguyen was making, his face appeared in the Vietnamese papers and on TV, which was how his mom and dad first learned their son had made the game. The local paparazzi soon besieged his parents’ house, and he couldn’t go out unnoticed. While this might seem a small price to pay for such fame and fortune, for Nguyen the attention felt suffocating. “It is something I never want,” he tweeted. “Please give me peace.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of...
Moreover, you can’t understate the psychological impact. For comparison, the success of Kony 2012 caused Jason Russel (its creator) to have a mental breakdown and run in the streets naked. And all Dong Nguyen did was post a few cryptic tweets, then decide that after he made far beyond enough money for anything he could have realistically dreamed of just a few weeks ago, he was ok with making less money from then on (he still made ad revenue from existing downloads) in exchange for less attention. It's actually impressive how well he kept his sanity during the ordeal.
Also, he probably got enough money to retire. If it did get $50k a day, he probably got more than a million before he pulled it. In 2014 Vietnam, that amount is probably more than most can make their whole life.
Heck, even in the US now, most people probably still can't make more than a milllion...