Mobile hit Flappy Bird makes $50K a day in ad revenue
After being downloaded 50 million times.
Minimalist free-to-play time-killing phenomenon Flappy Bird is making a whopping $50K a day in ad revenue.
This figure was announced by the game's developer Dong Nguyen in an interview with The Verge, where it was noted the game's been downloaded 50 million times.
For the uninitiated, Flappy Bird tasks players with guiding a fat fowl through gaps between Mario-esque pipes. Tap the screen to make ol' Flappy flap and make it through as many openings as you can. That's it.
The productions values are crude with assets that may or may not be stripped from Mario, and there's no music or alternate game modes. Yet, despite being out since last May, Flappy Bird has only recently become massively popular, currently resting atop the App Store and Google Play charts.
"The reason Flappy Bird is so popular is that it happens to be something different from mobile games today, and is a really good game to compete against each other," Nguyen said in an interview with The Verge.
Another reason for Flappy Bird's success is that it's entirely free without any microtransactions. Instead it's completely ad-based, without even the option to buy a premium version that disables the ads. When asked if this might be added later, Nguyen replied "Flappy Bird has reached a state where anything added to the game will ruin it somehow, so I'd like to leave it as is."
He then added "I will think about a sequel but I'm not sure about the timeline."
Now watch Eurogamer's mobile-focused sister site Modojo make Flappy Bird look easy with a ridiculous score of 69. Then try it yourself and wonder how anyone can achieve such greatness.
