Pigg World

» see world.pigg.ameba.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Pigg World opened to a capped number of players on 15 November 2012 and went fully live twelve days later. It was a town builder that ran in a browser window. You were the mayor of an empty patch of ground, and you filled it with houses and shops, then with public buildings and roads, while three separate meters decided how fast you were allowed to do any of it. Stamina paid for collecting chips from your shops and for solving the little problems your residents raised. Mayor power paid for construction, at a different rate per building. Both came back when the town leveled up, or when you spent money on jelly.

It lived inside Ameba, the portal CyberAgent had built out of its blogging business, and specifically next to Ameba Pigg, which was the big one: a Flash avatar world past ten million registered accounts by the end of 2011, funded by selling virtual furniture to Japanese twentysomethings. Pigg World borrowed that audience, that account and that art style, and pointed all of it at a different verb. In Ameba Pigg you parked an avatar in a public square and watched other avatars arrive. In Pigg World you ran a municipality.

The date worth knowing about this game is not the shutdown. On 31 December 2016 the staff blog posted a notice titled, roughly, about the future of Pigg World operations, and after that the event releases stopped. For a game whose entire content pipeline was limited-time event buildings and the materials to make them, that was the end of development. The switch stayed on for another three years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three years of nothing ~

What runs in a browser game after the developers leave is the part nobody documents. The buildings all still worked. The stamina timers still refilled. The shops still produced chips to collect, and a town that had reached a high level was still a town you could log into and tidy. What was gone was the reason to come back on a particular Tuesday, because the reason had always been an event with a limited building in it.

Turkey got its browser town builder from Facebook rather than from Ameba. CityVille and its neighbors were everywhere on Turkish Facebook in exactly these years, on the same logic of timers and paid shortcuts, and they were playable in a language you already had. Ameba was a Japanese account system attached to a Japanese blogging service, which is a much higher wall than a Flash runtime. I was twenty eight in 2012 and building nothing in a browser, though I recognize the shape of the timer from further away than I would like.

~ the day it died ~

The closing notice went up in September 2019 and was updated on 23 October. It did not claim the game had failed. It said that Flash development and support would end at the close of 2020, that the major browsers would stop running Flash Player, and that the PC version of the Pigg services would therefore shut down on 2 December 2019, in a maintenance window between 15:00 and 22:00 Japan time.

The refund section is the honest part of that document. Casino Dollars, the paid currency, could be refunded after the service ended, on a window that ran until 2 March 2020. Exchange tickets and Ameba coins were not refundable, on the reasoning that they still worked in the company's other services. Every other in-game currency was worth nothing after the shutdown, and players were told plainly to spend it first.

~ the next chapter ~

CyberAgent's answer for the displaced was Pigg Life, a smartphone app announced for the summer of 2019, and the notice promised that furniture and clothing from the PC version would carry over, with exceptions it did not enumerate. Clothes and furniture are portable because they are inventory rows. A town of your own buildings, laid out in an order you chose on a grid the new app did not have, is not.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »