Earlier this week, Flappy Bird developer Dong Nguyen said on Twitter that he intends to return Flappy Bird to the iTunes App Store, but “not soon.” The Vietnamese designer pulled his game from the App Store at the height of its popularity, despite the fact that by his own estimation, he was pulling down about $50,000 a day in ad revenue. That’s a lot of coin for a simple game about a bird who crashes into pipes, which made it all the more baffling when Nguyen killed the App Store listing.
While there have been plenty of rumors about the “real” reason behind the game’s revocation, a recent Rolling Stone profile reconfirmed Nguyen’s contention that he ended the craze because he didn’t need the money or want the spotlight. Sure, he could be a savvy marketer who’s waiting for the excitement to die out altogether so that he can cash in on Flappy Bird nostalgia and re-release the game as Flappy Bird HD Remix. But it seems like he’s just a dude with an admirable lack of interest in “going viral.”
In the meantime, players will have to amuse themselves with the 795 (and counting) Flappy Bird-inspired games in the Flappy Jam—or the innumerable Flappy Bird clones that have saturated and suffocated every pore of the App Store like paint on an Auric Goldfinger paramour.