I missed the whole Flappy Birds phenomenon; I played Angry Birds for a while but gave it up, and now pretty much the only games I ever play on my computer are Doom (very old school) and Osmos (very new school). So I wasn't particularly interested in the fact that the game had been shut down, until I saw this interview with creator Dong Nguyen:

Flappy Bird was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed…. But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It’s gone forever.

So Dong Nguyen, who was making as much as $50,000 a day in in-app advertisements, decides to pull the plug because of worries over the impact on his players. (He has other games on the iOS store but, Forbes says, if "he thought users were getting addicted, however, he said he would not hesitate to also take them down.")

I would love to send him a copy of my book as a thank-you. And I hope that other game and social companies take a second and ask themselves whether dopamine addiction is really the best business model they can come up with.