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Have you seen students playing Flappy Bird? Do you hear everyone talking about their scores?
Flappy Bird is a free downloadable game for phones and tablets. The key is to tap the screen to make the bird go up. To win the game, players have to make a bird go between pipes without colliding into them. If the bird hits any of the pipes the game is over.
“It is too hard, my high score is only 3. It is the utmost outrageous game ever,” said Michael Stephens, Bob Jones student.
When Flappy Bird first came out in May of 2013 it did not get many downloads until November. According to Fox News, the download volume in North America jumped 25 times in December.
By January the number of downloads skyrocketed. Flappy Bird had over 50 million downloads.
On January 17th, Flappy Bird was rated the Top Free App on IOS. Later, it reached that title on Google Play. According to Fox News, Flappy Bird was the top free iPhone app in 107 countries, and the top free app iPad app in 109 countries, receiving more than 48,000 ratings.
Despite the game’s success, Doug Nguyen, the creator of Flappy Bird, started to receive abusive threats from users about the game. On February 10th, Flappy Bird was taken off the Apple and Google store. According to Forbes, Nguyen thought the game was too addicting and felt it was better to take the app down entirely.
The same day Flappy Bird was taken off the app stores, phones with the app popped up on eBay selling for thousands of dollars. Some phones even went up to $5,000 dollars.
“It is an addicting game and it makes you angry. It’s crazy people are buying phones for thousands of dollars for a little game that was free,” said Evan Smith, Bob Jones student.
People with the app already on their phone can continue to play the game. Unfortunately, those who never downloaded the game are forced to pay high prices if they wish to play the “addicting” app.
