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Comment by applecore | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, by removing Flappy Bird from the App Store, he opened the door for shitty clones to reach the top of the charts. This arguably made the lives of users worse. He also passed up the opportunity to make millions of more dollars in merchandising.

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At least it's given the world a new alternative to 'a to-do list' in demonstrating new technologies/languages/etc. There are ones for various different gaming frameworks:

https://github.com/uralozden/flappy-bird

https://github.com/ellisonleao/clumsy-bird

The ZX-81: http://bobs-stuff.co.uk/quack.html

and so on. To my shame, I made a version that you play by flapping your arms:

http://experimenting.alastair.is/flappyarms

Flappy Arms, nice one, might be fun on Kinect as well. Flappy Bird has become an experimentational platform of its own.

Oh cool, I made something similar at PennApps this year. I made a Chrome extension that let you play a bunch of flappy bird clones by flapping your arms on webcam.

Shitty clones would've been made irregardless of him removing the app from the store.

> He also passed up the opportunity to make millions of more dollars in merchandising.

If you had enough money, would you realize it?

In the US, one study found that income is positively correlated to happiness only up to $75,000/year. If the $50K/day claims are true, in the 41 days between January 1 and February 10, he made enough money to live at $75,000/year for the next 27 years, without investment of any kind.

It's reasonable to guess that he will invest the money, and that the money/happiness plateau is significantly lower in Vietnam than in the US due to a lower cost of living. So he could be living at the happiness plateau for the rest of his life.

So why exactly should he care that he's passed up millions of dollars in selling stuff nobody needs? Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727770.101-money-can...

Talking about shitty clones, many have been pulled down by Google:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airhoc.fla...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ante.nyanc...

This part of the interview seems relevant here:

"People can clone the app because of its simplicity," Nguyen says, "but they will never make another Flappy Bird."

Flappy Bird is itself a shitty clone - an imperfect copy of it runs even odds of being a better game.

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