Stolen, the controversial online game that allows players to trade using representations of Twitter accounts, has closed doors, effective immediately.

The app had become a viral hit, despite never becoming more than an invite-only service, with tens of thousands of users and a constant clamour for invitation codes from others. But it had also faced an increasing amount of criticism over the nature of its game, which involves playing at buying and selling the Twitter accounts of real people – most of whom had never signed up to the game.

In a tweet sent on Thursday night, the app’s creators announced: “We’ve heard everyone’s concerns and have decided the best thing to do is to shut down.” The app is no longer available in the app store, and users attempting to use the service are greeted with blank screens.

Stolen after the shutdown. Photograph: Stolen

The app’s founder, Siqi Chen, elaborated in an interview with tech site The Verge: “Our goal with taking it down today has just been to make sure we stop what is happening – that we stop the harm, real and perceived, that people are getting from the existence of our product. We didn’t spend hours and months, sweat and tears to build something like this and have people see it this way. This is not who we are.”

The central gameplay of Stolen involved accumulating a virtual currency, which players then used to “buy” other people’s Twitter accounts. It sparked criticism from commentators including Gadgette’s Holly Brockwell and the Guardian’s Leigh Alexander, who pointed out the distastefulness of the app’s tone: when a user is “stolen”, a banner appears declaring that they “belong to you now”.

Additional criticism was levelled at the app for the lack of an opt-out option at launch, meaning that if any Twitter user’s account was added to the game (and signing up to play automatically uploads the Twitter accounts of everyone that player followed), they had no recourse; and for the ability to leave a message on the profile of users who had been stolen, which drew comparisons with the similarly controversial (and similarly dead-on-arrival) “people rating” app Peeple.

Despite the media attention, however, Stolen remained small by the standards of a free online game. As of Wednesday, it had just 40,000 users, although that number was artificially low given the fact that the service remained invite-only right up until its death.

The app began life as a spinoff from a social media app named Heyday, a photo journalling service which shuttered in 2014. But Chen already had a long history building popular online games, and so the company decided to pivot to yet another game, according to an interview with Chen in Forbes last week.