The Rise and Fall of Flappy Bird: Flapping it’s Way into Copyright Infringement?

By: Tanjeev Thandi

Flappy Bird is no longer flapping its wings.  Invented by Dong Nquyen, a Vietnamese developer from DotGears, Flappy Bird rose to the top of charts and became the most downloaded app of the year…and then disappeared.

The actual concept behind Flappy Bird is quite simple.  Players control a tiny bird through a maze of metal pipes by tapping on the screen, and that is pretty much all there is to it. In fact, the game only took Nguyen three days to develop.[1]  With such a simple concept, it’s baffling that this app became such a success.  The game was downloaded more than 50 million times since it launched in May of 2013.[2]  Flappy Bird reportedly brought Nquyen around $50,000 a day in advertising revenues.[3]

Despite its success, Nquyen abruptly took this app down as it was appearing to be on the rise and attributed his reasoning to the game’s addictiveness.[4]  Nguyen took the game down as it was gaining attention and popularity, much to the nation’s surprise.[5]  It appears that the popularity of the game was the very reason that he even took the game down since it “ruins his simple life”.[6]  It had became “the world’s most popular free app, from both the Google Play store and Apple’s App store”.[7]

Nguyen claimed on Twitter that he did not take down the game because of legal reasons, however, one of the real questions is whether or not this game was taken down due to copyright issues.[8]  Two individuals close to Nquyen reported that Nguyen received a warning letter from Nintendo that the pipes and other art depicted were lifted from Nintendo’s Super Mario games without any modification.[9]  Nintendo recently denied allegations that they were pursuing legal action against the app.  Nintendo’s spokesman Yasuhiro Minagawa told the Wall Street Journal “While we usually do not comment on the rumors and speculations, we have already denied the speculation”.[10]

Although Nintendo claims to not be taking action, the resemblance between Flappy Bird and Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. art is uncanny.  It is possible that taking down the game was strategic for Nguyen, because it was taken down before big companies had much incentive to come after him as they would if  “his profits become significant enough for big developers (like Nintendo) with big legal departments to be motivated to come looking for a cut”.[11]  There is also speculation that taking down the game so abruptly was a marketing ploy to foster significant attention, downloads and anticipation for a follow-up game.[12]  This possibility seems unlikely judging by Nquyen’s Twitter however, since he claimed that the game was “ruining his simple life”.[13]  Nguyen told Wall Street Journalists that he is waiting to regain normalcy in his life and even refused to be photographed for their article.[14]

Nguyen and subsequent app developers are not the only ones profiting from Flappy Bird’s success. The game has become such a craze that people are now selling their phones with this game downloaded on eBay for thousands of dollars.[15]  Flappy Bird has opened the door for the “small man” to create simple concept apps and have the success of famously branded game consoles by using little to no creativity.

The reality is that the game may be dead, but the idea is not.  What seemed to be a hybrid of famous app Angry Birds and Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. is sure to spark up lots of imitations in the near future.[16]  The emergence of similar games is sure to continue this cycle of mobile cloning, but since the concepts are so simple, who is to say that a clone is a clone? This begs the question, when will all these creativity-lacking apps be replaced by truly original and creative games? As long as there are little to no repercussions and a lot to gain, the mobile scene appears to continue as a sea of simplistic games with little innovation.