With that premise, selling to an established company would have been the most irresponsible thing he could do. After all, the biggest assets of the game are its large user base, the media hype and just that "addictiveness". So this would probably be the first thing any buyer would have exploited, making Dong's problem worse instead of better.
If you did that for a month, that would be the Vietnam purchasing equivalent of maybe about $33,000,000. He still has income coming in from the game, it hasn't stopped. He has enough money to retire and live a nice life in Vietnam.
For many people (myself included) enough is enough! He made enough and now he wants to get back to his quiet simple life. That is what he values, not an endless quest for more money. He felt the game was destroying his life. I don't blame him, I wouldn't want that kind of attention either.
Some people can just be happy with what they have.
[1]http://www.thanhniennews.com/business/vietnam-average-monthl...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
1. He's still earning ad revenue from existing installs.
2. In the last 22 hours of the app's existence (when he announced
he would be taking it down) more than 10 million new people
installed it.
I'm sure everything he says is true and it is not a conscious strategy, but the end result is the same.
Or you could just take the Bill Watterson route, shut up shop, and live the rest of your life comfortably and in private.
That's the Workaholic Test™ -- if you make a million dollars, do you drop everything and sit on a beach somewhere reading a worthwhile novel, or do you move the goal posts and carry on toward a new, less realistic goal?
Most people won't make a million dollars, so most people will never know whether they're workaholics.
For example "don't leave money on the table" or "make as much money as possible" could easily be a principle someone adopts. In such a case, she would be standing up for her principles by maximizing her acquisition of money at the expense of other things.
Example: The asbestos industry officials knew of asbestos dangers of asbestos since the 1930s and had purposefully concealed them from the public. To make money.
In the US, $350,000 (1 week @$50k/day average) works out to somewhere north of $200,000 after taxes. That's a lot of money, even if it's not life changing for somebody in the tech industry with a typical salaried job in the Bay Area.
I would have done the same thing if I was in his shoes; just get out of the spotlight with whatever money I already made(and still making from previous-installs). Getting paid 50k, even just once, for a mobile game I wrote over a weekend is more than enough. I wouldn't care how many millions I left at the table by dropping it and running away.
I'd just upload it to github, throw on WTFPL[1], and run away never to be seen again.