Chickens Can’t Fly goes indie on Windows Phone

23 October 2013 AmusedSloth

Chickens Can’t Fly was just re-released as an indie game on Windows Phone.

You may have noticed that Chickens Can’t Fly is no longer on the Windows Phone marketplace, after being an Xbox LIVE game for more than a year. This is especially frustrating for people who downloaded it already, got some achievements, and then changed their phone recently, because they can no longer download the game and play it, or get the rest of the Achievements.

The Story

Gold

Let’s see how that happened. When we launched as a ‘Must Have Game’ back in February 2012 on Windows Phone, we were already hard at work to add some new features that were just being added to the Xbox LIVE platform for Windows Phone games, such as Avatar Awards, Asynchronous Multiplayer and In-App Purchases. At that moment, IAP was not natively supported by the Windows Phone platform, so we used a framework developed by Microsoft specifically for Xbox LIVE games, and paying for these was done with Microsoft Points, a virtual currency used in the Xbox ecosystem.

bagMeanwhile, Xbox LIVE decided to drop the concept of mspoints and convert everything to real money. This went into effect gradually in different parts of the world, but finally when it was completed, the surprise came: in a number of Windows Phone titles that have used mspoints for In-App Purchases, this system stopped working. So when you would try to purchase anything, you’d be greeted by a ‘Transaction failed’ message. These games were pulled from the marketplace soon after, and the games are no longer downloadable.

The Sadness

Sad Chicken

Normally, this could easily be fixed with an update that removed the IAPs, or converts the game to use the native IAP support which is available since Windows Phone 8. But in this case, the option to do the update was out of our hands, since we are not the direct publisher, Microsoft Studios is. And for the limited number of games that were affected, the official decision was to no longer support them, but allow the developers to re-release the games as we see fit.

The timing of this was not ideal since we just launched the game on iOS and Android, and now Windows Phone (which was our first platform) was the only major mobile platform that did NOT have Chickens Can’t Fly.

The Good News

So finally the good news of the story!

Chickens Can’t Fly is now available again as an indie game on Windows Phone, with the following changes:

Chicken Approves
  • All skins are now available to everyone to use: Diver, Knight, Vampire, Alien and Ninja
  • Dojo will now unlock as soon as you finish Aquarium, without the need to buy it
  • The game now runs at 60Hz on most devices
  • Sadly, we had to remove Xbox LIVE Achievements and Leaderboards, but they’re still available locally, to unlock them and challenge yourself
  • The game remains at the low price of $0.99

 

So go ahead and download the game on your platform of choice!

 
Download for Windows Phone 8
Download for iOS
Download for Android on Google Play Store