Dong plans to remove his game from the stores due to the social media backlash. He says it has ruined his simple life and rumors state that he has received death threats.
Would you enjoy the mass attention and how would you handle it?
While I hope to have a successful game I would personally never want the MASSIVE attention. I think his developer career is changed forever unless he makes a new alias. Ever game he would publish under the same name would most likely receive the same attention from people looking for Flappy Birds version 2.
Some media outlets doing a witch hunt against his game. Like Kotaku. Or just read the comment sections of the articles about Flappy Bird.
He also made the mistake to tell TheVerge, that he makes 50k a day in Ads with his game. That attracts enviers like there is no tomorrow.
Personally, I grant him his success. He was lucky and that’s cool.
I’m sure he is grateful. But such success comes also with downsides. Like many haters and thousands of Emails a day. It’s not just the money you get.
And if you read his tweets, he obviously doesn’t feel very comfortable with the attention he gets. I kind of understand him.
This is a marketing ploy, this guy is an Asshole. Game Developers get shit from consumers on a daily basis, death threats are part of the job for AAA devs. I know plenty that have dropped out because of it. This guy is just fishing for attention.
IKR like who cares? In just 20 days you can become a millionaire. In one year, you will have 18 million! That is insane! I would take all that fake internet hate anyday cause in reality, nobody is going to recognize you on the streets and call you out. On top of that, saying that you will take out the game will give you even more hate.
I think the lesson to take from all this is that the best business practice is apparently to saturate the market with a flood of cheap games using a sub-week dev cycle, hoping one will randomly gain a completely inexplicable level of success and make you a millionaire. Lots of examples of that, now…
You say it’s an attention seeking ploy while simultaneously acknowledging that it’s a true and genuine problem… while simultaneously contributing to it! So… which is it? If AAA devs drop out of the industry all the time why is the same not valid for this fellow? And why add to it?
I don’t know if it’s real or not, but I’m not going to trash someone based on nothing. He got lucky, his success came with side effects that he doesn’t like, he says he’d rather drop out than carry on. I see no reason not to see that as being the case. Believe it or not, money isn’t everything to everyone.
