People are selling their actual phones on eBay right now because Flappy Bird is still installed on them. Not the phone as a phone, the phone as a delivery vehicle for a game that doesn't exist anymore. I saw a listing last night with a starting bid of $999 for what was, functionally, a used iPhone 4 with a scratched screen. The description didn't even mention iOS version or storage. Just: "Flappy Bird still on it, will not be reset."
Quick recap for anyone who somehow missed it (unlikely, but I know a couple of you read this blog specifically to avoid the rest of the internet): Dong Nguyen, the Vietnamese developer behind Flappy Bird, pulled it from the App Store and Google Play on February 10th. He'd tweeted a few days before that he "cannot take this anymore," which is a wild thing to say about a game you made in a few days for basically no money and which then somehow became the most downloaded free app in the country. The game was reportedly pulling in something like $50,000 a day in ad revenue at its peak, and he killed it anyway. I respect that more than I expected to.
What I didn't expect was the resale market. Within about 48 hours of the app disappearing, eBay was full of listings for phones and tablets that still had it installed, priced anywhere from a couple hundred bucks up into the tens of thousands for the more absurd ones (I don't believe anyone actually paid five figures for a used Android phone with a bird game on it, but the listing existed, and that's the internet doing what the internet does). eBay eventually started yanking a bunch of these under their policy against selling used electronics based on preloaded software rather than the hardware itself, which, fair, that's a pretty obvious loophole to close, but it took them a few days to get around to it, and by then the story had already turned into its own thing separate from the game itself.
Here's the part that actually interests me and that I haven't seen anyone write about directly: the reason this worked at all is that Flappy Bird was never really about being a good game. It was punishingly, almost insultingly hard: you tap a bird through pipes and it dies if you so much as breathe near a pixel wrong — and that's precisely why people wanted a copy that still worked. Nguyen didn't pull the source code out of anyone's phone. He just stopped new installs. So the panic wasn't "I'll never be able to play this game again," it was "I have a scarce object now and scarce objects are worth something," which is a much older and dumber human instinct than anything to do with mobile gaming. Somebody is going to write a thesis in ten years about Flappy Bird as an early, dumb, accidental experiment in digital scarcity and honestly they'll have a point, even though nobody involved was thinking about that in the moment.
I'll admit I never installed it. I downloaded maybe four flappy-bird-style clones in the days right after it vanished — there were dozens flooding into the App Store within about a week, all named some variant of "Flappy" or "Bird" or "Splashy," which is its own small tragedy of app store search, and deleted all of them within an hour out of pure irritation. My personal high score across all four combined was something like 6. I am apparently constitutionally unable to tap a screen at the correct interval, which either says something about my reflexes or about how badly designed the whole genre is on purpose.
Also going on this week, in case anyone wants a reason to feel old alongside me: Comcast announced it wants to buy Time Warner Cable for something north of $45 billion, which as a Comcast customer of exactly zero enthusiasm fills me with the specific dread of knowing my hold music is about to get worse in some abstract, merger-shaped way I can't quite explain yet.
Anyway. Check your old phones before you factory reset them. Apparently there's a market.