You know what I would have liked from Rovio, @Kelani?
A thank you message. To the very active and influential communities that have supported games like Bad Piggies.
Bad Piggies is like Firefly. It’s unique. It’s not that popular and it’s largely eclipsed by more mainstream titles. But such things usually get a huge cult following after a while.
Like Firefly, it also got canned after one run, literally.
What I would wish for earlier this year is someone high up in Rovio telling people that the game will not be updated further “due to changing priorities on Piggy Island” and saying Thank You to the Facebook and Twitter communities that helped support and promote the game in their respective ways. Insert a paragraph “we’ll be back when the time is right for a future Pig Game”. This would have garnered great respect for the official Community efforts and kept everyones hopes up in the long term.
It’s also simple to do. Just draw up a crude drawing in broken English, sign off as King Pig (or his Office) as they did in pre-release art. Simple enough to whip up in 15 minutes using Photoshop and a drawing tablet. Schedule post, watch the likes flood in and people saying “Oh, it was awesome, thanks for supporting our community.”
Fans & gamers like myself will understand. We’re not clamoring for updates. We even said we can provide our own “life support” for an un-updated title by existing means of community outreach. Better yet, release a Level Editor and we can be completely independent of official Rovio support. What’s there to lose? Bad Piggies is not even the only physics sandbox out there. There are way better and more complex ones like Kerbal Space Program (which will survive forever, being 100% moddable).
Instead, fans were kept waiting for “coming soon” or “no news yet” since time the beginning of this year. Official community support also got suddenly canned about mid-2014. No useful info was given to communities like mine. We simply (rightly) assumed it’s time to find a new patron and play along in-character with the storyline of AB: Stella, because it’s the smarter thing to do than trying to cling on to a dead title. Dead titles don’t attract new players en masse, competitive as the gaming market is today.
With some advance official notice that “X title will be unsupported after this update”, communities can plan ahead, and shift their modus operandi from following just one game, to becoming a universal Rovio gaming outlet.
Better yet, give us notice before the Community team is tasked away from the piggies or downsized the point they don’t have any time left to communicate.
To be fair, there may be a Bad Piggies 2 in the works. But without official confirmation, there is no way indie communities can keep the fire stoked and ready for the next sequel. Visitors to respective Pages and YT Channels can notice for themselves, re-hashing old themes doesn’t keep peoples’ attention. And eventually, even die-hard fans of the green characters will move on to other franchises which do support their dedicated fans with more than just occasional content features.
The problem with niche titles like Bad Piggies is, if people move on, they’re not going to be satisfied with Stella, Transformers, or GO. They’ll be looking for games with complex problem solving puzzles if not outright virtual engineering simulators.
So I have been fighting a rear-guard action by my lonesome keeping up some semblance of activity on the Piggy game front for the 14th month now since the last update, but it’s quite obvious it’s going to run out of steam pretty soon.
In the meantime, I’ve done a little to spread the word that pig engineering fans should be prepared to follow the latest updates from Golden Island (Stella’s realm). One cannot accurately roleplay King Pig’s office without KP’s official presence, after all.
Nor will I spend several hours on Photoshop making unique fanart like I used to do, with dwindling viewership and interest. The comments sections of mainstream gaming outlets pretty much says it all, “Who cares about Bad Piggies?”
Disclaimer:
The opinions expressed above are those of my own, and only my own. I do not speak for Rovio nor do I know of actual internal policies within Rovio Entertainment Ltd, nor am I aware of changing Community Team priorities. I have no insider knowledge.
I just comment what I felt to have observed and the above overview is not meant to be impartial. I am an average gamer. I follow what is awesome, and move on when it’s not.
