The Life and Death of Flappy Bird February 10,2014

I was late to the Flappy Bird party. I only started playing the annoyingly compulsive chart-topping game on Friday morning because we were featuring it in a discussion about the games business on our new weekly radio programme Tech Tent.
But after a couple of hours I, like members of my family, colleagues and just about everyone else, was hooked. It was the crudest game imaginable, with graphics that might have been created 25 years ago. You tap continually on the screen to keep a bird from flapping into a series of pipes. But it was the fact that it was so darned hard that made it addictive - and so lucrative for its developer.
Then on Saturday the Vietnamese inventor of the game Dong Nguyen tweeted this:
"I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' users, 22 hours from now, I will take 'Flappy Bird' down. I cannot take this anymore."
It wasn't clear exactly what he couldn't take any more - after all, he had earlier said he was earning $50,000 (£30,467) a day from the adverts that appeared on the free game. But by Sunday night, true to his word, he had removed Flappy Bird from the Google Play store and from Apple's App Store. If you have just heard about the game and want to play it, tough - it is now only available to the hundreds of thousands, or probably millions who've already installed it.
What can we learn from Flappy Bird's brief but brilliant trajectory across the gaming landscape? Firstly, that as the screenwriter William Goldman said about Hollywood and the movie-going public, when it comes to understanding what will make a successful game, "nobody knows anything…"
Huge businesses like EA set large teams to work with seemingly unlimited budgets to build hit games, then an unknown solo developer in Vietnam races