A Few Words on Ameba Pico

While I'm working on my national finals post, here's my first non-Eurovision post, and I wanna talk about some childhood memories.

10 years ago, the internet was just starting to take off, and I was almost turning 10 years old. (Time flies, eh?) At the time, I had more or less six games that I would play religiously.

Two of them were racing games, three of them were Facebook games, and the last one, was this:

(apologies for the low resolution)

I promise I'll get onto my other old games at some point, but today I wanna talk about what perhaps was the most interesting online game I had ever played up to that point.

Some of you reading this might even recognize this game - its name is Ameba Pico, created by CyberAgent, and it is essentially a port/translation of the Japanese Ameba Pigg, which was blowing up in Japan at the time. It's a game where you can dress up your own character, fancy up your room, and get out there in the "world" and interact with people, not least including inviting people to your room. There were several rooms and destinations which would imitate world-famous landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty. Other rooms provided services in which you could acquire unique accessories, such as gemstones, via a gacha or shop of some sort. And you could of course chat in the game.

I don't remember how I myself got into Ameba Pico. One has the feeling I just saw it one day in my Youtube recommendations, and I suppose the rest is history. It was big with (North) Americans, and they naturally uploaded many videos on the game to the still-rather-new video platform. I don't know necessarily how well it did with Europeans, but I imagine not too bad either.

I'll be honest, a lot of the nitty-gritty factual stuff I can't remember, so with a lot of this I'll basically be going off of the Wikipedia page. There were three types of currencies: Gummies, Tokens, and Candy Gold. The latter was only accessible via real-money purchases, and as the mischievous kid I was, I would try to get around it. Of course back then I was far more gullible, so I ended up with various computer viruses on my then-laptop (though I did have antivirus so it turned out fine), but as you might imagine, no Candy Gold (or "gold" as I think I and many others simply called it back in the day) was acquired from this process. You could earn a tiny little bit from in-game tasks I do believe, but it really was like single-digits which weren't enough to do anything. Or at least that's what I remember.

And from what I remember Tokens didn't really play much of a big role in the game at all? The primary currency was gummies I think. That was the main in-game currency with which one could buy outfits, most room decorations and expansions, and other stuff. The really cool stuff was gold-exclusive. Again, this was a decade ago, my memories are hazy at best.

Another thing that was cool about this is that there was an in-game chat, much like that of Roblox. And much like the chat of Roblox, while there was a filter on explicit words, it was easily bypassed. Me being the immature kid that I was, exploited this rather frequently, though even then I wasn't a swear-every-other-word kid. You'd also be able to make friends and such, again, much like Roblox. One wonders whether this overlap with Roblox was one of the factors that led to the shutdown of the game, at least initially the English version, i.e. Pico and not Pigg.

Which brings me to the next point. On the 5th of December, 2012, the official Facebook page named "Ameba Pico World" announced that in 12 days they would be closing down the service for good due to, and I quote, "limited developer resources". Looking at their stats, this didn't really add up.

Fortunately, a certain user named Matt made an explainer video in 2018, talking about the whole incident and his speculation on why the shutdown occurred, you can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn8H4RDr0kA

Whether you watched it or not, basically he suggests that perhaps Pico had failed to meet CyberAgent's market expectations (and I would add that part of it is due to its partial overlap with a then-up-and-rising-Roblox), and thus it was shut down.

Furthermore, the pinned comment on the video was allegedly written by a former CyberAgent employee, who says that basically all of their American services even involving other games were just withdrawn overnight. And though there were rumours of kidnapping due to two people meeting up who initially met via Pico, this employee says that no such kidnapping had occurred. And indeed according to this employee, the parent company thought that the revenue from these American ports were not high enough to justify their existence.

How ironic then, for Ameba Pigg, the original Japanese version of the game, to shut down 7 years later, in December of 2019. Though this was less because of revenue issues (though I'm sure it played a part), and more because Flash Player was being phased out. According to Matt, there were a group of dedicated Pico players who moved to Pigg briefly, and even made a little tight-knit community for themselves as the only English speakers in the game, but because the entire game was in Japanese and there weren't any options to play in other languages, the community slowly dwindled into almost nothing as people moved on, which is why the Pigg shutdown in 2019 wasn't nearly as detrimental to Western gamers as the Pico shutdown had been.

So what remains of Ameba Pigg and Pico now? Well, Ameba created two apps, named Pigg Party and Pigg Life, but both of those are in Japanese and are only available on Japanese app stores. Wikipedia says that these apps are "more interactive and have a closer resemblance to their predecessor", but of course I don't speak Japanese, and can't really be bothered to get onto a VPN just to download an app whose language I can't read.

But speaking of Japanese apps resembling Ameba Pigg and Pico, there is, believe it or not, a kinda "spiritual successor" to Pigg and Pico. One even suspects that this app might be why Ameba has fallen into relative irrelevance even in its native Japan, because this app is LINE PLAY.

LINE, a huge name in Japan, Taiwan and other parts of East Asia. A chat app with a primarily green theme, and is renowned in East Asia for its unique mascots such as Brown or Cony. It wasn't long before LINE branched out from being a chat app into the mobile gaming market. Hell, I myself had spent more than 300 USD on LINE Rangers over 5 years ago. LINE Cookie Run even has its own dedicated Western fanbase now. There are other games, but the main three, as far as I'm concerned, were these two and LINE PLAY.

Now, it should go without saying that LINE PLAY isn't the exact same as Ameba Pico or Pigg. But as far as diehard fans are concerned, I reckon this is the closest still-going thing. You can dress up in vastly exaggerated anime-like styles, I'm pretty sure everyone still has a house or a room, you can go out and talk to people, and it most definitely supports non-Japanese players. Biggest difference would definitely be the fact that this is exclusively mobile, not desktop. I'd download it to try it out (again) right now, but I'm not quite in the mood. Maybe I'll update this blog when I do. I have played it before, but my phone was running out of storage and I had to delete it, and it's been a few years since I've touched it even when I now have a phone with sufficient storage. By all means, try LINE PLAY if you want to, and let me know what you think of it, whether you've played Ameba Pico or not.

And I know we tend to romanticize our past, but Ameba Pico really was just something else that no other website or app could replace. Reading the comments on Matt's video, many of them were just people reminiscing about the time (and sometimes real-life money) they spent on the game. My memories are hazy from then, but one scene I do clearly remember was a casino-like location where I could get gemstones from a gacha. Otherwise I remember being able to buy car-looking sofas as well. I haven't maintained contact with anyone from there since then, nor really any other game to be honest, but this simple Flash Player Facebook game where you could dress up and talk to people will always have a special place in my heart, almost 10 years on from its closure.

Pigg Party has 1M+ downloads and Pigg Life has 100K+ downloads, certainly a far cry from the golden days of Ameba Pigg or even the smaller Pico. I think it's safe to say that Ameba Pico isn't returning in its original form, simply because the game was coded on Flash and Flash has been phased out in the past few years. Matt suggests in the comments of his video that perhaps CyberAgent could code a new version of the game in HTML5, but even he acknowledged that there wasn't any good reason to do so. The world's moved on. LINE PLAY is bigger and debatably better. As of writing this, it has 10M+ downloads on Google Play, although the official website boasts of 75M+ players around the globe. (Didn't know that many LINE users use Apple.)

It's how the market works. If something else comes along and is able to move with the times (and/or has huge corporate backing), older models get phased out. The demand for this type of game is already being filled by LINE PLAY and indeed the aforementioned Roblox. I'm even willing to bet that a not insignificant amount of players of Ameba Pigg in Japan just slowly migrated to LINE PLAY. (I would write the name in lower case, but that's how the title is officially styled on their website.) And I'm sure he wasn't the first to come up with this point, but Tom Scott noted very astutely in a video that "people like a mix of novelty and familiarity". And perhaps, seeing the takeover of LINE PLAY in the Japanese and Western markets, Ameba decided that there is no point in bringing back the website version of Ameba Pigg or Pico, and one has the feeling that the game is gone for good.

I'll try LINE PLAY again when I feel like it. But it really is a shame that Ameba Pico had to be shut down so suddenly.

I don't have any graceful conclusion to this rant. It's just the case that I regained access to the first Facebook account that I ever had yesterday, and I saw Pico content on there. If you share my nostalgia on this, do let me know.

Next time I'll probably be sharing my thoughts on one of the now-defunct Facebook games that I played. In the meantime, enjoy the games that you're playing now, because you never know how long they'll last.