One of the controversies surrounding the game has to do with its similarities to other games and its promotion.

1. The controversial case of Flappy Bird
Flappy bird the game online is a mobile game developed by a Vietnamese game developer Dong Nguyen. It is a fairly standard side scrolling game where you control a bird and your objective is to fly between lots of green pipes without touching them. Its developer claims to have developed the game over the course of several days. The main character of this game, a bird, was originally designed by Dong Nguyen for a game that was canceled in 2012.
Flappy bird the game online was first released during May of 2013 but became really popular in 2014. It received lots of criticism for its hard difficulty and possible plagiarism of various game assets and mechanics. Other people (including some critics) considered it to be very fun and addictive. By the end of January 2014 this game was reported to be the most downloaded game (out of the free games) in the Apple Store.
On February 2014 flappy bird the game online was deleted from both the App Store and Google Play (official Android store). It was done by the game’s developer because of the guilt he felt at the time. He said that the game was too addictive. This has spawned a great amounts of clones, some of which were fairly successful (not a lot of them, though). During this time there were reports of phones being sold over the internet with flappy bird the game online installed of them for a much higher price. In August 2014, Amazon’s official store (called Amazon Fire TV) has released an exclusive version of the game called flappy bird the game online Family.
One of the controversies surrounding the game has to do with its similarities to other games and its promotion. When asked by Chocolate Lab apps about the promotional methods being used for this game, Dong Nguyenreplied that he never used any. He also said that he considers the game’s sudden success to be due to luck. However, some people suspected that Dong Nguyen was using bots to help promote the game over the internet. When asked this question directly, he refused these accusations. Dong later tweeted that “If I really did fake it, Apple should not havelet it live for months”. Some popular game resources, such as Kotaku, have criticized the game for having ripped-off game assets (the pipes resemble those being used in Mario, for example).
Flappy bird the game online was also viewed as being very similar to PiouPiou vs. Cactus (another mobile game released in 2011) by Vietnamese newspapers. PiouPiou vs. Cactus features very similar, tap based gameplay,a very familiar main character (which is a yellow bird) and obstacles (pipes and cacti). Because of this, various newspapers (French and Vietnamese) accused the game of being a rip-off. The French developer of the assumed original (PiouPiou vs. Cactus) has also noticed flappy bird the game online to be very similar to his own game. Dong Nguyen, however, claims to not know anything about it. In august 21 of the year 2014 Nguyen has released a new game called Swing Copters, which is also a side-scrolling game, although it has somewhat different mechanics.