Flappy Bird may be gone, but the craze seems far from over. A used 16GB iPhone 5s with the now defunct game pre-installed is going for nearly $100,000 on eBay. That's right, over 60 lakh rupees for a used phone with a free app installed. With the eBay auction not yet over, the price looks set to rise further.
The young Vietnamese creator of hit mobile game Flappy Bird removed the game from the App Store and Google Play on Sunday saying it ruined his life. The game which was created in 2013 but only surged to the top in downloads earlier this year was removed early Monday.
The success of the game that based its appeal on being simple and also maddeningly difficult made its creator Nguyen Ha Dong, 29, a minor celebrity. The game was downloaded more than 50 million times on App Store alone. In an interview with The Verge, Dong said Flappy Bird was making $50,000 a day in advertising revenue.
The eBay auction itself seems genuine, since the user selling the phone has been around on eBay for a while and has received 121 ratings, 96.3 percent of them positive, the typical measure of an eBay user's authenticity. As of filing this report, the phone had received from 74 bids 22 bidders, with the highest bid just under the $100,000 mark at the time of publishing this post.
Update: It seems eBay has stepped in and taken down the auction.
Dong, from Hanoi, wrote on Twitter on Saturday that the Internet sensation caused by the game "ruins my simple life" and he now hated it.
"I will take Flappy Bird down. I cannot take this anymore," he wrote.
On Twitter he didn't address the inflated downloads allegation but denied suggestions he was withdrawing the game because it breached another game maker's copyright.
"It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore," he wrote.
Written with inputs from AP
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