back to article Rovio: Actually there will be Angry Birds Space on Windows Phone

Rovio has apparently changed its mind, with the company's CEO telling Reuters that a Windows Phone 7 port of Angry Birds in Space is in the offing, though he's not saying when. That contradicts what the company's chief marketing officer told Bloomberg earlier, but CEO outranks head of marketing so we're betting that Angry …

COMMENTS

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  1. Tom Chiverton 1
    WTF?

    ho ho ho !

    Either someone was just fired, or MS just stuffed an envelope of cash through the door with a note saying 'please with a cherry on top'.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Tom

      Or this was a deliberate plot to check how much attention / protests / comments such a rumor would attract.

      If it wouldn't even be mention worthy you simply drop the whole thing and no one will be the wiser (or, as you suggested, you may even be compensated). If you do manage to stir up some protests you will know up front that you can expect at least /some/ sales.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Don't you know?

      Microsoft gives money to entice developers, developer, developers to develop apps for its 'turd ecosystem'.

      If that's not bribery, I don't know what is.

    3. RightPaddock

      Bidding

      Nah,

      envelope with Redmond postmark with the note "please put AB on WinPhone", was fatter than the one with Cupertino postmark with the note ""please don't put AB on WinPhone"

      AAPL's wallet is much fatter than MSFT's wallet and Rovio's is getting fatter

    4. N13L5

      ... massive envelope

      Or maybe a death threat from the Bilderbergers...

  2. ItsNotMe
    Pint

    Oh thank goodness.

    Now I don't have to kill myself. OK...may I still do...not sure...it's Friday...let you know on Monday.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Oh thank goodness.

      You bought a Windows phone? You've subscribed to the 'turd ecosystem'?

      Please kill yourself.

  3. Richard 22
    Boffin

    Open GLES

    Of course, Symbian phones do have Angry birds extra levels, plus Seasons and Rio (and are still being kept up-to-date, if a little behind other platforms). I wonder if this could be to do with Symbian supporting industry standard OpenGLES graphics interfaces, and Windows Phone (presumably) not supporting them? I can imagine the porting effort being somewhat larger for Windows Phone in that case.

    Personally I'm hoping for a Symbian version, but I'm not really holding my breath.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Open GLES

      I took peek inside Angry Birds Space and seems Rovio is using plenty of Lua scripting and I don't think there's support for that. Physics engine seems to be Box2D so there's not too much of an issue on that.

      So, issues seem to be OpenGL ES and Lua.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      OpenGL ES = "Everyone but Microsoft"

      So... OpenGL ES 2.0 is supported by iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebGL, Maemo, Symbian, non-Android Samsung, Palm, Archos, and Raspberry Pi. Looks to me like all the key players.

      Perhaps Redmond has to learn that when you come late to a market with established standards, you have to change the way you do things if you don't want to remain permanently sidelined.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: OpenGL ES = "Everyone but Microsoft"

        Windows Phone OS is nothing more than Windows CE with a Zune-Bob layer (Metro UI) slapped on top of it.

        Now they're going to shove this monstrosity down the throats of desktop users in Windows 8.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: OpenGL ES = "Everyone but Microsoft"

          Barry is clearly very upset by this news.

    3. DrXym

      Re: Open GLES

      I think the fact that Windows Phone 7.5 doesn't support any form of C would be a far more serious issue. GL / DirectX differences could be abstracted away but if you're meant to rewrite the app in a different language then that's a far more serious issue. Android supports C (or anything that can be built with C), so so does iOS. I expect 90-95% of the code can be made common to either platform with some glue for the UI, manifest, advertising APIs and so on.

      .NET has managed and unmanaged C++ support. I suppose that if either of them were supported in Silverlight it might ease the issue but really MS should allow devs to produce apps in straight C++ in a sandbox. If they don't then apps especially games are going to lag behind what other platforms offer.

  4. Andy 70
    Meh

    generic flame post

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Angry reply to generic flame post. Accuses OP of $SexualDeviance

      1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

        Perplexed reply to Angry reply. Asks where he can get $SexualDeviance as reasonable price?

        1. hplasm

          Clarification post. $SexualDeviance is the price, in USD.

  5. ScissorHands
    Devil

    Sign of things to come

    When you go to the Support section on the Rovio website, "By Device/Platform" does not list Symbian, MeeGo, or even Nokia. But it lists the Nook Color.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Its not just opengl

    Microslop insist you write all WP7 app in languages not avail on any otjher mobile platform - C# or silverlight. So to support WP7 you have to re-write the entire app from scratch..... This requires lots of bunga occuring

    1. Ye Gads
      FAIL

      Re: Its not just opengl

      Err. No.

      If you want to write your iPhone or Android apps you can, you just need to compile them with Mono, the open source .Net runtime. There are several people selling solutions that do this for you that integrate into Visual Studio, the C# developers tool of choice.

      1. cynic 2
        FAIL

        Re: Its not just opengl

        Now that's just missing the point. Spectacularly.

        Mono is useful only if your app was written for WP7 first. That's not exactly useful for (a) existing apps or (b) people writing new stuff that want to target markets where they'll actually make money.

  7. Sloppy Crapmonster
    Unhappy

    Could be worse...

    You could have paid for the PSP version.

  8. Keep Refrigerated
    Joke

    Angry Ballmers

    Presumably when the release date came and it was discovered avian astronauts would not be flung through space on WP7, chairs were flung instead.

  9. Gary F

    Obviously Microsoft are paying for it

    It's not worth a developer investing a lot of time and money porting to an OS that accounts for no more than 1.5% of the market. Unless someone is paying for your time. Otherwise your time is far more valuable spent on the continuing development of your products for 95% of the smartphone market. Simple business logic and economics really.

  10. This post has been deleted by its author

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    MeeGo

    Hopefully Rovio launch this for the N9/MeeGo, not only will it be an easier port but they'll be targeting a larger market than any other high-end Nokia smartphone...

    1. Heikki Härkönen
      Meh

      Re: MeeGo

      Larger market than WP7 IMO, but not larger than Symbian.

      Altho they might be paying Rovio NOT to support symbian with a bit thicker envelope.

      1. Manu T

        Re: MeeGo

        ... which they probably have.

        It shouldn't surprise me if Elop himself gave that idea to M$-marketeers :-(

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: MeeGo

        I can certainly see Nokia paying Rovio not to support MeeGo - anything to help undermine their own platform/product and further eliminate competition from the market in the vain hope it drives sales towards their new lame duck platform.

        What Nokia don't understand is that their former higher-paying customers now revile the company and their current strategy, leaving Nokia with the support of the low margin feature phone crowd and a few Microsoft loving simpletons (or more accurately, "the uninformed").

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: MeeGo

          Simpletons? Uninformed?

          I'd rather call them 'astroturfers and shills from wmpoweruser.com, wpcentral.com and everythingwm.com'.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: MeeGo

      Angry Birds Free with Magic v1.1.6 is already on the Nokia N9 MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan

    3. Manu T

      Re: MeeGo

      If market is indeed the deciding factor then everybody would port their games to Symbian too.

      Market is a meaningless buzzword invented by a bunch of moronic suits whom suffer from RDF.

      It's all about favouring phones that drain your wallets with absurd data-plans. And it's clear that the more technically adept phones actually save money instead of costing money. I'm thinking of phones that require data-plans to send a photo from one phone to another phone withing 2 meters from each other.

      Meego is however a bigger market than WP7 so why bother with WP7 anyway? Port it to XBox instead ;-)

  12. mark l 2 Silver badge
    Joke

    Im sure all 10 Win phone users who are interested will be happy by this news

    1. Keep Refrigerated
      Trollface

      That tired, old meme again...

      There's more than 10 people working at Microsoft you know!

  13. stylinred

    hold our breath?

    why should people have to hold their breath for a symbian "port" ??? when all previous angry birds have been on symbian... and space was advertised for symbian too

  14. Shao

    Windows Phone 8 should resolve most things

    At the moment games for multiple platforms are written in cross-platform tools that are essentially C++ with wrappers. However, Windows Phone 7 only allows C# .NET so its a rewrite to support Windows Phone 7. Furthermore, unless the game is one of those hidden objects low resource games, coding on higher levels like .NET, there can be performance problems.

    Windows Phone 8 supposedly supports native code which will remove this barrier. Until then, I can't see many games companies writing cross platform games for Windows Phone.

    1. Hans 1
      Boffin

      Re: Windows Phone 8 should resolve most things[, but won't!]

      Windows Phone 8 supposedly supports native code which will remove this barrier. Until then, I can't see many games companies writing cross platform games for Windows Phone.

      There is no market. Ok, so Ballmer paid these guyz to port it, but he won't be able to pay everyone all the time ... and I think a lot if not all the others will start crying to get some Microsoft cash. Also, everybody, even those lame blondes in the H&M store know that Windows Phone is for the sillier, whoever that may be.

    2. Neil 7
      Unhappy

      Re: Windows Phone 8 should resolve most things

      It's always the next bloody version with Windows Phone, isn' t it?

  15. Andus McCoatover
    Windows

    Yle (Finnish newspaper) reports:

    http://yle.fi/uutiset/news/2012/03/rovio_not_ignoring_windows_phone_3358313.html

    (Does Rovio view Windows 7 as a bit of a pig??)

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