It wasn’t just all the emails and tweets that Nguyen was getting which led him to pull the game from the App Store, it was also the barrage of local media attention:

As news hit of how much money Nguyen was making, his face appeared in the Vietnamese papers and on TV, which was how his mom and dad first learned their son had made the game. The local paparazzi soon besieged his parents’ house, and he couldn’t go out unnoticed. While this might seem a small price to pay for such fame and fortune, for Nguyen the attention felt suffocating. “It is something I never want,” he tweeted. “Please give me peace.”

Rolling Stone’s Interview With Flappy Bird Creator, Dong Nguyen