Addictive and hardest-ever in equal measure, Flappy Bird was proved to be a hit in the competitive app market, attracting more than 50 million downloads.

Many Chinese users are hooked into the time-consuming challenge renowned for its difficulty as well. Users tap continually on the screen to keep a bird from flapping into a series of pipes.

However, on Saturday the Vietnamese creator of the game Dong Nguyen tweeted this:"I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' users; 22 hours from now I will take 'Flappy Bird' down. I cannot take this anymore."

It wasn't clear exactly what he couldn't take any more - after all, he had said earlier he was earning $50,000 a day from advertisements. But by Sunday night, true to his word, its creator had removed Flappy Bird from the Google Play store and from Apple's App Store.

In a series of tweets, Dong Nguyen told fans of the game: "It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore. I also don’t sell ‘Flappy Bird’, please don’t ask. And I still make games."

With the increasing popularity of the free game, however, Nguyen began receiving negative feedback -calling him an "evil genius" for his "anti-human" game- which is believed to drive him removing the game offline.

In a previous tweet, Nguyen said: “I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.”