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I’m not sure which is more awesome, red velvet pancakes or green bacon on the bench. Yummm :D

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@burpie – Yeah I guess the ‘corporate policy’ in place @ Community doesn’t allow them to engage with people more directly, or to take a more proactive stance in massed communications. There are just about two styles of MC I notice throughout my working life.

One is about engaging people up front and controlling expectations by quality active initiatives. (aka, for instance by saying thank you to avoid a “dead and silent” ending)

The other involves saying as little as possible to reduce liability.

To be fair Option Two is far easier to manage and doesn’t create issues of occasional drama. But it’s less “professional”, so to speak.

And Option One generally requires a mature playerbase/community to work right. If 99% of comments on Rovio Facebook pages involve asking for updates 2 hours after one has just been released, then that might be the reason why the less risky strategy was chosen. Rovio knows what they’re doing, that much is obvious, and they’re usually months or years ahead of what we know from rumors and filtered down information. I’m just trying to point out it’s not necessary to impose an information embargo when there are people and communities out there (like the good folk at ABN) who manage consumer expectations within their own following. More news is better than no news and then a cover-up semi-automated copy/paste reply.

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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.

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Bluestacks being an emulator will require a decently specced PC to run the more demanding games. I can run Bad Piggies on an old-ish laptop, but not even confident at running Angry Birds GO. Also it takes some time for new games to be made available for Bluestacks.

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I appreciate the info likewise @mixx. I find it quite absurd the fan communities have had to rely on rumors all along to confirm this. This is the first time I’ve seen an official statement on the matter.

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Knowing how corporate marketing think tanks work, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rovio has some trick up their sleeve to make sure they don’t lose out.

It’s easy for us to criticize but we don’t have access to the latest publisher/developer priorities. Once they’re able to sort out their goals and get over the usual lead time to implementing new directives, the developers of Angry Birds can move fast and deliver many pleasant surprises indeed. (As evident in the surprise launch of Bad Piggies 2 years ago, and the current blitz with Stella & Transformers).

What we can’t rely on is consistency though – To date there is still no idea if there is a Pig Game sequel (squeal!?) or not so hence some discussion to repurpose Pigineering to broaden its scope and make up our own pig content, as I’m doing with the Stella reviews.

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@kelani, with ref. to my extensive discussions regarding pork and bacon matters over the last two years – there are issues with game design and coding that interfere with fixing the issues the communities have pointed out.

And also on the PC debate – it seems each release platform has its own fair share of challenges that need to be surmounted before each update / game is ready for mass proliferation, so there is some logic there in shortening the supply lines to better support the quality mobile gaming market.

All in all I don’t think it hurts anyone – hi end tablets are becoming easier to find and much more affordable than just a couple years ago, and Android 4.4 even has video recording capability (requiring Android SDK usage, but nevertheless functional) for the benefit of content producers.

I just have one bit of curiosity though – There are a number of very good tablets out there in the market now running Windows 8.1. There’s the MS Surface Pro series which is great, plus a number of tablets that come with Win 8.1 installed instead of Android. The lack of a PC port of the latest Rovio titles, IMO, is a sad thing as these Win 8.1 “tablets” are, for a lack of a better term… awesome. Who doesn’t like being able to install PC apps on a tablet? Pity there’s no GO and Transformers to go along.

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Thanks @abepa I’ll check it out and subscribe :)

Speaking of plush toys, the amusement park that opened near where I am living right now has a large stock of plush birds at reasonable prices. Then again paying Malaysian ringgit for anything is always awesome! However there is one ‘epig fail’ – they don’t have a lot of pigs. Only small kings and small/medium minions. Pigs are not halal. hahahaha!

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Hahaha @mspat being a giant sized baby is fun. Jeremy Clarkson would definitely agree to that lol.

Admittedly I’m not very keen to try Angry Birds at first. But then I saw the PILLOWS (ok ok, plush toys), I just had to buy one!

I started playing when the ‘pillows’ arrived. Muahahahaha, die pigs!

Moral of the story – convert the naysayers with angry bird pillow power lol.

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@wendy26 – we were just discussing this topic in a recent thread. You’ll find up to date sharings on the topic here:

PC/Mac versions may be on the way out.

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This recent video we made for the Bad Piggies 2nd anniversary has all the pig play examples our food reviewer in Texas does :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STU6HSZKP2w

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To be fair many of those absurd listings are run by bots/computer programs so they don’t follow any sort of marketing logic whatsoever. There are many hilarious stories shared about bot on bot price wars on the most ridiculously small items.

The idea of using plain minion pigs with simple dress up works great. Here in the Pigineering department we have someone making plush toy videos with 3 moustache pigs (one with hat, one normal, one tiny), a giant minion pig (as Fat Pig!) and a medium King Pig.

I suggested the Fat Pig is so fat he could wear human-sized hats. Minion pigs can also easily ‘cosplay’ as girl pigs with simple hair bows. Also the owner of that plush toy army wants to raid a Build a Bear workshop to get spare hats! He wants to do some Dr Pork roleplays if he can find some doctors’ tools and headgear too.

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@kelani, I have discussed the issue of PC versions for future titles with Rovio before and my findings were pretty much as you concluded.

There’s a huge problem with piracy on the PC platform, as well as easy availability of cheats and hacks that make it a poor platform. Lack of in-app revenue aside, the presence of communities who indiscriminately destroy any chance of fair play (case in point – Bad Piggies Road Hogs) have caused the Developers to look kindly towards the more controlled gameplay experiences featured in the newly released titles.

The issue of multiplayer and desire for fair play, of course, plays a big part in games like GO.

As much as I would love to have GO on the PC as a cartoon Need for Speed parody, I don’t think this is much of an issue to me, as an avid PC gamer and (old time) mod developer as there are a great multitude of other immersive, physics-heavy games available for the PC. And it would be difficult for Rovio to shift development priority from casual, fun games to the kind of seriously epic big-budget PC games we take for granted these days.

Also, high performance tablets (or even older iPads and Gtabs on the resale market) are easily available these days for a much smaller investment than a few years ago, and arguably, for the casual gamer, high end mobile apps like the latest 3D Rovio titles are more enjoyable than dealing with established PC gaming trends and issues (such as being put down as a “noob” immediately after joining a game, forum or community).

We are civilized animals, and warmly welcome “noobs” on Piggy Island in the interest of mutual goodwill and peace amongst various animal species, except pigs :)

I did put in some heavy feedback regarding the PC being a really nice platform for content development in Bad Piggies like non competitive sandbox games, and I can do a lot of stuff using a PC that I would loathe to contend with using greasy fingers on a small screen. So I hope we’ll have a small niche market for “serious” PC games that can sell themselves in the long run without need for in-app revenue.

But in the meantime I’ll just launch random junk into orbit in Kerbal Space Program whist playing Angry Birds Stella on a tablet waiting for the next staging event. Best of both worlds! :)

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@chiiyuen0109 I am from Malaysia as well and I teach physics to both large and small kids using Angry Birds and Bad Piggies. Also, plenty of halal jokes to pass around (within the family).

Ironically most of the enthusiasm I see now about Angry Birds are from old-ish kids and mothers, so it’s definitely not childish.

In the latest Rovio products like Angry Birds: Stella, I also point out that while the game and upcoming animated series is targeted at young children (well, girls, of course), it contains a great many references to social and even political challenges faced by adults as well.

This makes Angry Birds in effect a dual purpose franchise as what @kelani sorta points out. Yes, it’s cute and all. But like all great (future) classics they were designed by grown-ups and you can see a lot of added value by not judging the book by its cover!

Saying Angry Birds is childish is simply, a bit shallow in my opinion.

It’s like saying Transformers is unrealistic. Or Star Trek is “nonsense”.

In the former example, duh of course it is not meant to be realistic. Isn’t giant robots saving humanity and empowering the youth with the fate of humanity entertaining in an epic way?

In the latter, Star Trek is solely responsible for a great majority of consumer electronics and even next-generation spaceflight concepts today. Because of Star Trek, we have mobile phones and tablet computers. And NASA is conducting theoretical studies into an actual warp drive. #TrueStoryBro

Sometimes fiction is grounded in truth, and Angry Birds chronicles the struggle of two feuding animal species / civilizations in a quest for dominance – a very simple yet crucial story in the history of our planet’s evolution and a misguided and unnecessary squabble that… guess what, humans still partake in even today. That’s what makes Angry Birds fun. It’s fun BECAUSE it’s childish and we can blow up some pigs without guilt! :)

ps. Are you making your way to Angry Birds Activity Park JB anytime soon? I’ll be there this weekend once I gather my army of birds, pigs, cats and sheep fans :)

Umm, @kelani – as for Stella being childish… hehehe… look out for my upcoming review of Stella: The Animated Series shortly. It’s waiting for @birdleader approval and I drew a lot of parallels with current affairs and challenges faced by peoples of differing expectations and/or social needs. Definitely a grown up thing… once we look past the pink overtones. :)

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Ha! Having pillow pricing issues? I used to collect Angry Bird plush toys back in 2010 and 2011 and there are virtually no local retailers that carried Rovio merchandise, and those specialty shops that would pop up in touristy areas charged as much as $50 for a small red bird. As though I needed any further excuses to totally boycott local retailers here!

I found some very affordable original Rovio plushes on Ebay, bought many of them and sold them to friends at “below market rate” to share the joys of reasonably-priced Angry Bird pillow ownership :)

Just for laughs @abepa – You haven’t seen the ultimate amazon.com listing for a plush piggy yet:

Behold! The Ten Thousand Dollar Postman Pig!

Rovio took my lighthearted post really seriously and investigated for real lol!

I’d love to see a Six Million Dollar Pig someday.. King Pig with real gold crown, maybe? :D

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Hahaha @jkhab69 I like @kelani’s puns. They are very punny :) Did you see the Pig Bang theory on page 1?

Hey @kelani, guess what my final entry for the Birdday event is?

It’s entitled “An Oink Too Far“, featuring an historical account of Operation Brisket Garden, based on a #TrueStoryBro!

Background:

A few months after the infamous Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Bad Piggies seek to push deep into the heart of Angry Birds territory by mounting the largest chairborne operation in history. The 202nd Chairborne Infantry Division will conduct (ch)airdrops close to the Arnham and Njibacon bridges in the Netherhams, bypassing the majority of defensive Angry Birds slingshots situated on the Western Front.

The XXth Panzerkampfbacon Division will break through behind Angry Bird lines and link up with the air-deployed chairborne pigs (who said pigs can’t fly? they have rock-it lawn chairs on my youtube channel :3), then push onwards into the Birds’ heartlands. They claim they will enjoy roast turkey by Thanksgiving!

Historical Outcome:

Operation Brisket Garden proved to be less of a success than anticipated, as heavy Panzerkampfbacons (armored fighting bacons) bogged down in soft polders and were restricted to a single road for their entire advance.

Further, heavier than expected resistance around Njibacon and Arnham proved to be a major hindrance to lightly armed chairborne forces, which got bogged down in house to house slingshot combat, and subsequently failed to capture the bridges in time before they were demolished.

Thus cut off from reinforcements until the XXth Division erected pontoon bridges, the chairborne pigs were summarily dispatched by the Angry Bird defenders. At Oosterbeak, the drop zone key to the success of the Njibacon Bridge effort, was overrun by The Blues, preventing crucial resupply to the attacking piggies.

Elements of the 303rd Hainanese Chicken Rice Regiment, although greatly outnumbered in the opening days of the operation, successfully held their ground despite the lack of Bomb and Chuck support. Once heavy Bombs and long-range hyper-velocity Chucks were committed in-theatre, the defending Angry Birds successfully fought the invading Pigs to a standstill in the vicinity of Arnham, preventing further advances by bacon forces until late in the Second Pig War.

Writer’s note:

Adapted from Operation Market Garden, 1944.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Market_Garden

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What’s the industry standard for pigs?

HAMilton Standard of course!

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@jkhab69

SoutHAMpton works too!

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Haha, I for one am not alarmed when people talk about video game addictions. I have been a gamer since I was like, age 4 or 5 when someone sat me in front of a crude joystick and keyboard, then realized I was in control of a fully armed F-16 fighter jet over enemy territory.

When one of my colleagues talked about Angry Birds I took some time to mull over the new fad and eventually tried it out after 2 months of procrastination. I had a then brand-new Samsung phone/tablet hybrid then (OMG $650 phone) and Angry Birds on a ‘large’ screen by 2010 standards gave hundreds of hours of entertainment.

I don’t usually get too concerned over 3 starring everything but I make a point to note carefully how each level is designed, where their weak spots are, and that all bacon should be exploded for 5,000 points. My ‘devotion’ to the bird side is only made 200x stronger with the release of Angry Birds: Space and I also used to have a large collection of Angry Birds plush toys, which I made a point to import direct from UK warehouse outlets. I refuse to support the local ‘licensed retailers’ here in South East Asia because of their tendency to mark up product prices to lunar orbit and beyond – no way am I paying $50 for a small Bird when Walmart in the States has them for $5 or something!

Eventually my entire office was indunated by Angry Birds plushies and I started selling them off to members of my motorcycle club who don’t have a chance to own them due to excessive local prices. I also made jokes that pigs are ‘not halal’ and thus must be exploded. I made a few new Malaysian friends from that lol!

I controlled my ‘addiction’ by using Angry Birds and follow on titles as a bedside game. I am too busy at work to fling to my heart’s content anyway.

Later, I switched to the Pork Side in September 2012 due to Rovio’s new “bacon appreciation project” aka Bad Piggies pre-release artwork. Bad Piggies appeals to my long-hidden love of sandbox games, which I played extensively early in the 1990s (you remember The Incredible Machine don’t you?).

I also got to meet various key persons of the franchise in an impromptu last-minute Facebook-advertised event in my nation of residence, and of course, I did talk about using Angry Birds as a tool for physics education, demonstrated using civil engineering knowledge to rapidly demolish tall pig buildings, finally talking about Bad Piggies and asking if I could start up a new facepork fan page for the launch of the new game.

The answer was an enthusiastic YES.

2 years later I have nearly 200 Bad Piggies insane creations to showcase on YouTube, can mess around with @birdleader learning to publish Bird articles (hopefully without going off-topic and writing about military aviation), and have a new appreciation for green bacon. Bad Piggies as a game may not survive, but it was a nice experience learning how to protect junior contributors and a new community from a whole shipload of hate speech and directed attacks from, shall we say, less mature persons and communities for nearly the whole duration of running a Pork Propulsion Laboratory.

Of course, wanting to do my own thing and make more simulations of real life things by ‘pigitizing’ them means I just ignore the trolls and let them see ‘doing my own thing’ means being able to do pigger and better things as time goes on! If I want drama I will do it in real life where there are real rewards roleplaying the cast of Desperate Housewives :)

True gamers use the Internet to help others and benefit all mankind through selfless acts of sharing strategies and fostering quality community engagement… Angry Birds Nest style.

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@kelani

Haha truly a ‘speak of the devil’ moment.

I seldom watch TV for the past decade or so. I loved the good lighthearted productions of the 80s and 90s but in the “modern” age it’s just same old stuff I don’t want to look at.

The only thing I don’t get sick of watching is Top Gear UK, for quite obvious (epig failing) reasons :)

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Thanks for the insight!

It’s nice to read these and reaffirm what really goes on behind the scenes :)

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You know occasionally Rovio releases those analytics data that claims to show global statistics of number of birds flung, number of pigs popped, hours of gameplay, etc? I think those are from some sort of stat tracking implementation in various apps.

This type of stat tracking I believe is quite common nowadays although other developers give an option for users to opt-out of said tracking or “product improvement” schemes.

More recently, the #UnlockTheFlock event (currently still ongoing) tracks no. of birds flung in Angry Birds Friends in order to ‘unlock’ content from something related to Angry Birds: The Movie.

I don’t believe there’s anything to be alarmed from user tracking as personal information is not collected or exploited in any way – rather, the developer captures usage statistics.

“Usage tracking” has also existed in other forms for many decades. Where do you think TV companies generate program ratings from?

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Not only does the resolution matter, the pixel density per inch and screen dimensions will matter as well.

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Why does the Corporal Pig always win the Annual Hunger Games?

Ans:

Everybody was rooting for him!

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Why are teacup pigs so popular these days?

Ans:

They Keep Calm and Drink Tea even as Angry Birds demolish their houses.

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OMG @kelani those are hilarious :D

Automosqueal sounds like the product names Japanese like to use. OTOMOsqueal lol!

Airloin and Pan Ham is making me want to have a steak, like right meow :3