Dong Nguyen Net Worth

Dong Nguyen Net Worth – $3.5 million

What is Dong Nguyen’s net worth?

Introduction

Dong Nguyen is a Vietnamese video game artist and programmer who gained fame after developing the mobile game ”Flappy Bird.”

He is also the founder of .GEARS Studios.

Biography

He grew up in Vạn Phúc, a village near Hanoi.

His mom worked for the government, while his dad owned a hardware store.

During his childhood, he used to play Super Mario Bros.

At age 16, Nguyen began coding his own games.

At age 19, Dong joined Punch Entertainment, a Hanoi game studio.

In 2009, he got his Engineer’s Degree in Computer Engineering from Hanoi University of Science and Technology.

.GEARS Studios

In 2010, Nguyen founded .GEARS Studios (DotGEARS Studios), a company specializing in creating simple retro pixelated games rather than the more complex ones seen today.

”When I start DotGears.com, I followed the philosophy that I can fire and forget,” Nguyen explained for Polygon. He added: ”So when I release a game, I can already forget about it, and I don’t do any marketing about it.”

Flappy Bird

On May 24, 2013, Dong created Flappy Bird, an arcade-style game where you tap the screen to make a bird fly. The game mechanics were simple yet irritatingly difficult.

The game was described as an “insanely irritating, difficult and frustrating game which combines a super-steep difficulty curve with bad, boring graphics and jerky movement.”

“Flappy Bird” became popular fast, generating 50 million downloads by January 2014. The game ended the January of 2014 as the most downloaded App on the App Store.

”The reason Flappy Bird is so popular is that it happens to be something different from mobile games today and is a really good game to compete against each other,” he detailed.

Dong also said that he developed Flappy Bird in around two to three days.

On January 27, 2014, PewDiePie uploaded a video of him playing Flappy Bird. That video was viewed 37 million times. 

On February 10, 2014, Flappy Bird was removed from the app stores. Dong cited guilt as a major reason.

”I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down,” he tweeted on February 8, 2014. He continued: ”I cannot take this anymore. I also don’t sell ‘Flappy Bird,’ please don’t ask.”

”It is not anything related to legal issues,” Dong said in another tweet. 

”Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed,” Nguyen told Forbes. ”But it happened to become an addictive product.”

After Flappy Bird was taken down, users owning pre-installed copies of the game started to sell their devices on eBay. Devices that had the app pre-installed sold for $1,499 or more.

Soon after ‘Flappy Bird’ was gone, many clones of it appeared, including – Flying Flappy Unicorn Bird, Flappy Pterodactyl, City Bird, Fly Birdie, Flappy Hipster, and Splashy Fish. Dong said he probably wouldn’t take legal action against any copycats. In March 2014, over sixty ‘Flappy Bird’ clones hit Apple’s App store every day.

”People can clone the app because of its simplicity, but they will never make another Flappy Bird,” Dong said.

In February 2014, Code.org released a set of lessons that would allow students to make their own Flappy Bird clone.

Swing Copters

In early February 2014, Nguyen launched a new game, Swing Copters. In the game, you can guide an airborne protagonist through narrow gaps.

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Flappy Birds Family

In August 2014, a revised version of Flappy Bird, called Flappy Birds Family, was released exclusively to Amazon Fire TV.

”Flappy Birds now are on Amazon Fire TV with incredible new features: Person vs. Person mode, more obstacles, more fun, and still very hard,” said the official statement.

Ninja Spinki Challenges

In 2017, his newest game, Ninja Spinki Challenges, was released. The game blends six different game types to train an apprentice ninja.

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Trivia

In December 2014, Google revealed that ‘Flappy Bird’ was the most searched game of 2014.

Dong Nguyen – Net Worth

So, how much is Dong Nguyen worth?

Nguyen earned most of his wealth from creating Flappy Bird. At some point, Dong made about $50k per day from in-app advertising.

Later, Nguyen released other games, such as Ninja Spinki Challenges (made up of several mini-games), Flappy Birds Family, and Swing Copters.

Therefore, Vietnam-based developer Dong Nguyen has an estimated net worth of $3.5 million.

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