Flappy Bird’s removal from the app store: A case for piracy

Flappy Bird’s developer, Dong Nguyen, has broken his radio silence to say that he pulled the game for the sake of your well-being. Nguyen said he originally developed the game to help people relax and blow off steam, but instead it became an “addictive product” that caused harm to its players. I guess the game might still return, if Nguyen has a change of heart, but it seems unlikely at this point.

Flappy Bird. Over the last few weeks, this almost insultingly simple Helicopter clone with Mario-like graphics has experienced one of the craziest roller coaster rides in the history of gaming. At the beginning of January, despite the game originally being released way back in mid-2013, no one had even heard of Flappy Bird — and yet, for reasons no one yet understands, when the game peaked at the start of February, it was being downloaded millions of times per day, and accruing the developer, Dong Nguyen, hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue. If its meteoric rise wasn’t weird enough, though, get this: Yesterday, citing the trials and tribulations that the game had brought him —  ”Please give me peace… I cannot take this anymore… I just cannot keep it anymore” – Nguyen removed Flappy Bird from the iOS and Android app stores. If you already downloaded Flappy Bird, you’re free to keep playing it — but if you’re a late to the party, you’ll sadly never know the frustrajoy of repeatedly bashing your small avian brain into green pipes. Unless, of course, you pirate it.

At the time of writing, there are thousands of people downloading Flappy Bird from The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites, and direct download (DDL) sites are moving a lot of copies as well. Usually, of course, I am against depriving game developers of their income, but Flappy Bird is an odd edge case where piracy may actually be acceptable. At the very least, even if you flat-out disagree with piracy on ideological grounds, read the next few paragraphs — you might be surprised at how they challenge your ideals and worldview. (Read: Why I pirate.)

A case for piracy

Flappy Bird is a free game. It generates revenue by way of ads that pop up when you die. We haven’t exhaustively checked, but the pirated versions of Flappy Bird appear to still have ads. We haven’t confirmed if the ads are still linked to Nguyen’s advertising account, or if the pirates have switched them over to their own accounts. Let’s assume (perhaps a little optimistically) that Google and Apple would crack down on advertising accounts used by pirates, and that the ads are still paying money to Nguyen.

 It’s kind of hard to imagine what it must be like, going from a handful of downloads per day for seven months — the game was originally uploaded to the Android and iOS app stores in May 2013 — to millions of downloads overnight.