TrialPay was one of the early offers providers on the Facebook platform that helped social gaming companies monetize the vast majority of users that were unlikely to pay for virtual goods. Instead of paying for virtual currency, players could get virtual currency for free by signing up for offers like Netflix subscriptions instead.

After an early ugly period on the platform that saw offers of questionable quality from several rivals, Trialpay emerged as a favored partner to Facebook. The company was initially offered a deal to be the exclusive offers provider for Facebook. Now the company says it reaches more than 70 million monthly active users worldwide and powers offer walls for top developers like Zynga and Playdom.

TrialPay partnered with Facebook in February 2011 to offer DealSpot — an in-game offers API that served daily deals to players, giving them virtual currency rewards if they mad a purchase. Before DealSpot, developers had to set up relationships with advertisers and video providers individually. This was difficult for companies without large sales teams.

In addition to Greylock, Visa and T. Rowe Price, the other investors include DAG Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s Growth Fund and QuestMark Partners. TrialPay announced it increased transaction volume by seven times and saw four times as much traffic to the platform in 2011. The company did not specify how it will use the funding beyond general growth and innovation.

It’s worth noting that Visa’s investment in Trialpay represents yet another step into virtual currency for the credit card company. Visa acquired Playspan, a company that supports dozens of payment options for casual game players, in Feburary of last year for $190 million in cash.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, BMW xDrive Challenge peaked at 90,000 monthly active users and 9,000 daily active users.

The game gives players the chance to drive several vehicles in the BMW X series, beginning with the X1 and progressing through the increasingly powerful X3, X5 and X6 models.

Players are able to drive freely around the game’s area for as long as they like to get a feel for the cars, and can engage in races by stopping at the start line of the game’s various racing environments, which include Road, Dirt, Ice and River. Players can either challenge their friends to a race, take on computer-controlled opponents or enter daily, weekly and monthly championships, with prizes provided by the game’s sponsors.

Rather than providing real-time racing, BMW xDrive Challenge takes an asynchronous approach, with players recording their best lap times with which to challenge their friends. When racing, a “ghost car” can be seen showing the route the opponent took, but there are no collisions between vehicles. The same is true for the championship races, with the only difference being that opponents are pulled from all over Facebook rather than the player’s friends list.

Completing races awards players with BMW Credits, Race Credits and experience points. BMW Credits are used to refuel and repair the player’s car and purchase new vehicles. Experience points, which are awarded not only for completing the race but also for driving stylishly and accurately, are required alongside BMW Credits to unlock the different vehicles. Race Credits, meanwhile, are used to access championship races.

The game is graphically intensive and as such requires a relatively powerful computer to enjoy to its fullest. The developer recommends an Intel Core 2-powered PC or Mac with a Shader Model 3 graphics card as a minimum. There appear to be a few technical issues at the time of writing — when tested, the game ran consistently well in Mozilla Firefox but sometimes refused to start at all in Google Chrome, giving an error message complaining of “too many players.” The developer does, however, claim to have tested the game on six browsers across PC and Mac, so results may vary.

As an advergame, the game is sponsored by K2, Bang & Olufsen, Deluxe Music, Rauch and BMW itself. The sponsors’ involvement extends not only to having their names on the game’s introductory screens, but also in providing prizes for the championship races. At the time of writing, for example, K2 is offering a prize of some BMW-branded skis for the best drivers on the icy track.

The game has been primarily marketed towards selected countries in the central-eastern European markets (specifically  Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia), and promoted heavily via local BMW Facebook fan pages in those regions. The game has also grown organically through its “friend racing” mechanic as well as Facebook’s usual Like and Share systems. AppData shows relatively steady growth since launch, but it’s still early days for the game, and the team at game.punks is thinking long-term.

“Currently the game is growing, and we are hosting daily, weekly and monthly competitions with prizes from the sponsors,” explained Marco Höglinger, managing director of developer game.punks. “As the game goes into this year, we will look at the options for increasing the number of cars in the game and adding a new game mode to encourage off-road driving.

“[We currently have] no plans to launch on G+,” added Höglinger, on the subject of potential expansion to other platforms alongside Facebook. “It would be an interesting experiment to launch on a mobile market, and also on gaming networks such as BigPoint and Steam. This would need to be negotiated with the brand holder, though.”

SponsorPay’s growth reflects the increasing popularity of video advertising, as the format has gained traction in both mobile and social games over the past year. SponsorPay launched BrandEngage last July, following on the heels of competitors like Flurry and Tapjoy, who began offering video advertising products after it began to become apparent they performed far better in mobile apps than traditional banner ads. SponsorPay’s BrandEngage product allows advertisers to show players both videos and brand engagement campaigns, which the player can watch, Like and share.

SponsorPay began its life as a virtual goods monetization company on Facebook, but followed the same trajectory as many of its clients, looking to mobile after the mandatory use of Facebook Credits made the platform far less lucrative.

The Berlin-headquartered company picked up $5 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners in February to develop its mobile product lines. SponsorPay’s advertising appears in games from Ubisoft, Bigpoint, Gameview Studios and Digital Chocolate. The company is predicting similar growth in 2012.

Inside Social Games extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Social games. Check them out below!

6waves/Lolapps is an international publisher and developer of gaming applications on the Facebook platform. 

AdParlor is an official Facebook Ads API Partner and manages large-scale Facebook advertising campaigns, acquisition campaigns for social game developers and fan growth campaigns for large brands and agencies.

Frima Studio develops social games for big brands.

TapJoy offers monetization services for social and mobile gaming applications.

TinyCo creates games to be played on mobile devices.

Appatyze is a solution for Facebook developers looking to monetize their apps and utilizes an online auction platform for buying and selling in-app advertising.

maudau helps companies cross-promote their applications.

LifeStreet Media is a performance advertising platform focused on social applications.

Kontagent is a developer of analytics solutions for social application developers.

SoftLayer provides cloud and dedicated hosting services for social application and game developers.

Gree builds mobile social gaming ecosystems for mobile social gaming customers.

Nanigans helps advertisers maximize the effectiveness of their Facebook advertising.

Peak Games is a provider of social games for users in the EMEA region.

RightScale provides cloud computing management for social application and game developers.

Speaking to us today, CEO Lisa Marino explains that the company is too big to be profitable at its current size and that certain intellectual property no longer lends itself to RockYou’s vision for profitable social games. By spinning out Playdemic, RockYou effectively culls 17 members of its central studio and 56 more are impacted in its Redwood City, CA office. It’s unclear from where the remaining 127 cuts will come.

“We made a lot of mistakes in the last 12 months,” she says. “We built up a central studio that looks a lot like EA or Zynga with 45 heads in it when we really only needed 10 or 12. We developed two large-scale sim games — Social Life and Cloudforest Expedition — and Social Life was [canceled] in May and Cloudforest is in the process of being kicked back to Loot Drop. [Playdemic’s] Gourmet Ranch is profitable, but [the developer] is not building the core content that we want.”

In the chart above, we see RockYou’s MAU and DAU for the past six months.

Marino says that in trying to introduce its new ad platform — where RockYou collects a stream of revenue unhindered by revenue share with Facebook — to existing titles, RockYou “screwed up” its leading Zoo World franchise and only repaired the damage in September. Our AppData traffic tracking service reflects a decline in the game’s monthly active and daily active users that began in August of this year. It currently has 1.9 million MAU and 270,000 DAU. Marino says that with these numbers, the average revenue per user doubled in the month of October and the newly launched Galactic Allies has an even higher ARPU than that.

“We don’t need 200 people to be a success,” Marino tells us. “We got away from running RockYou as a business and we relied very heavily on the creative side of the house. What we learned this year was that was a bad strategy. Cloudforest is a perfect example. We spent an awful lot developing that game and ultimately — as a power user — I couldn’t figure out how to spend more than $10 in it. It’s a beautiful frickin’ game, but it doesn’t monetize. If we can’t have a game that’s both really good and profitable, that doesn’t count as a good game to RockYou.”

As for future development plans, Marino says that RockYou is not backing off on its partners program, even though the two-game publishing contract with Loot Drop was officially terminated over the summer. At present, she confirms that Zoo World 2 is here to stay, a game called Hooked just entered closed beta on Facebook a week or so ago, and a third game from a publishing partner studio will be launching in January. Marino declined to elaborate on the game beyond saying it was in “the guy genre,” implying that Galactic Allies has sold RockYou on the value of the mid-to-hardcore male audience.

“The other lesson I learned this year is don’t talk about our games before they launch,” she says, referencing two times in the last 12 months that RockYou was beaten to market — most recently by Zynga’s Adventure World, which is in the same genre of exploration-based role-playing game that Cloudforest Expedition occupies. “We’re focusing on a content strategy — both for [owned and operated] or studio partners — for high replay value games that monetize well both with digital goods and ads.”

The ad platform RockYou has been implementing into its games is heavily reliant on video ads. Rather than working with a third party service, as Zynga does with SocialVibe, the publisher-developer built its own service so that it wouldn’t have to share revenues with anyone, including Facebook. Marino says their ad platform videos enjoy click-through rates (CTR) of 12% – 20% and its cost per one thousand impressions (CPM) is “compelling.”

“This has been the core of gaming strategy since 18 months ago,” she explains, “but we didn’t have the games to back it up. For a very long time, the social gaming space has always said we’re not a media industry. RockYou [has been saying] that’s not true fo years. Media is about superstar content. Media companies create their own content and well as [publish] content from others. [They then] distribute it and monetize that content. And we’ve finally proven the value of that dual monetization track.”

Marino says that RockYou expects to be profitable “for the first time” in Q4 of this fiscal year. Employees are being told about the layoffs today at 3:30 PST.

• Social gamers spend 13 hours per week on social networks and an average of 9.5 hours per week on social games
• Social gamers have made 20 new friends through social gaming
• 24% of players report they have clicked on an ad in a social game and made an online purchase
• Social gamers make frequent purchases in real life, especially on entertainment

The study was conducted by market research firm Interpret on behalf of RockYou, and polled 2,000 social gamers (60% of whom were female) over the age of 18 who lived in the US and played at least one hour of social games a week.

Chinese Social Game Maker Papaya Finds Women Most Profitable – Beijing based PapayaMobile has found its most profitable gamers are women. According to Papaya, 4% of the players of its social mobile games are “whales” and 69% of those whales are women. Whales are defined as the most enthusiastic and dedicated players, willing to spend more than $100 on a game and responsible for 60% of the company’s revenue. PapayaMobile was last on Inside Social Games in February, when executive Si Shen contributed a guest post about the rise of location-based social games in Asia.

Setgo Teaming with Teepee to Expand Its Gaming Portal – Games discovery portal Teepee is expanding its offerings, partnering with startup developer Setgo to bring its new game Castaways to the platform. Teepee games offers casual gamers a curated experience, giving members access to a selection of games based on their profiles and incorporating the social features of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Both companies are based in the UK.

Facebook Credits Prove Profitable for Double Down – Double Down Interactive is reporting a massive surge in transactions since adopting Facebook credits as its in-game currency. According to a press release from the Seattle developer, revenues are up 50% in since their game Double Down Casino made the switch. On July 1st it became mandatory for all Facebook games with virtual goods to use Facebook credits, a move that was praised by some developers for promoting cross-game liquidity.

Zynga Goes Sequential with Mafia Wars 2 Comic – Zynga is prepping its fans for Mafia Wars 2 with a digital comic that reveals the back story and main cast of the upcoming social game. While larger game studios such as Ubisoft and Capcom have been using comics to promote high profile launches for some time, the move is a first for Zynga. The comic was created in collaboration with UDON, a Canadian art collective specializing in promotional artwork for the entertainment industry.

Real Prizes Coming to Facebook Games – Two new companies are seeing if combining social games, real world prizes and Facebook could be the next big thing in social media advertising. On September 29th Titan Gaming launched a beta version of a new games network on Facebook called Games and Prizes, the same day that startup Dobango released a Facebook version of its game play2Win. While each service is slightly different, play2Win focuses on letting players earn coupons and gift cards with smaller, local retailers, while Games and Prizes focuses on driving user engagement through branded games, the end result is the same — both services give Facebook gamers the chance to earn discounts and real prizes, and both services reward players for referring friends.

Google+ Gets Big Fast – Google+ has seen a huge influx of new users and traffic since entering open beta last week. According to data from analytics firm Experian Hitwise, traffic to the site is up more than 1200%. The total number of users is also likely to have crossed 50,000,000 according to analyst Paul Allen, who estimates the site is gaining 2 million users a day. We covered Google+ this week as social gaming heavyweights Zynga and Kabam brought their popular CityVille and Global Warefare games to the new social network.

EA Moving Into Social Game Marketing With New EA Legend Platform – EA announced this week it has developed a new game marketing platform called EA Legend. The platform was designed to help developers market their mobile, social, online and console games, by giving them access to EA’s existing user base of 300 million people. EA Legend will be officially unveiled on October 4th. In the announcement, EA touted that it had increased its audience by 30% this year, a great deal of that upswing coming from EA new Facebook game The Sims Social, which now has over 60 million monthly active users.

Raptr Finds That Zynga Draws Core and Casual Gamers – Zynga is great at engaging and converting players, and the appeal of their games is increasing even with hard-core gamers, according to a new report. Gaming based social network Raptr surveyed its membership and found that fans of Zynga’s “Ville” series log as much time on the social games as fans of the top core gaming franchises. In addition a third of XBox 360 gamers have played a Zynga game, a 50% increase over last year. The study also found that Zynga players logged in, on average, 8 times a day, and that Zynga games are played for three times longer than the rest of the top 10 social games combined. The full report can be read here.

Kobojo Commits to Expansion in Latin America – Leading French social games publisher Kobojo is beginning an aggressive international expansion, opening an office in Madrid and bringing on European games industry veteran Nicola Cencherle to oversee operations in Iberia, Italy and Latin America. According to Cencherle, Kobojo’s goal is to localize its games for 10 new languages before the end of the year, expanding that number to 20 by 2012, with a particular focus on Latin American countries. Kobojo recently translated their flagship Facebook game PyramidVille into Portuguese.

[Launch] Tiny Speck Finally Releases Surreal Social Game Glitch – San Francisco/Vancouver based developer Tiny Speck released their long incubating social game Glitch this week. The brain child of Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield, Glitch is a surreal social game that tasks players with expanding and exploring and expanding the Glitch universe. The catch is that the persistent world comes with it’s own highly unique rule set — for example, eggs come from eggplants, and pigs hatch from eggs. Players can do almost anything they want, but the game is designed to be highly social and cooperative.

[Launch] Vostu’s New Social Soccer Game Golmania on Facebook, Orkut – Brazilian social gaming company Vostu unveiled its latest title this week, Golmania, a real-time, multiplayer soccer game that enables players from all over the world to join teams, play in real soccer stadiums and organize private tournaments. The game is available in Portuguese, English and Spanish and utilizes Vostu’s multiplayer engine, which allows players on separate social networks to play and chat with one another.

[Update] Big Bang Theory Facebook Game Sees Solid Growth – The sitcom The Big Bang Theory launched a Facebook tie in game last week called The Big Bang Theory: The Mystic Warlords of Ka’a. The digital card game, based on the character’s favorite game in the show, has seen decent growth since its launch, currently sporting just over 60,000 monthly active users. The game was developed for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment by Dire Wolf Digital.

SocialVibe is best known on Facebook for its integration with Zynga’s games, such as its Super Bowl XLV engagement app promoting Kia Motors or last year’s Thanksgiving Facebook app that drew funds on behalf of charitable organization United Nations World Food Programme. The company’s integration types vary by brand partner — CEO Jay Samit stresses that SocialVibe never charges for creative services, which encourages the brand to experiment with ads. One example he uses is another Kia Motors engagement app that allowed users to re-edit segments of a 30-second TV commercial for the brand’s latest car, effectively creating their own music video. Another is a Toy Story 3 trailer viewed in FarmVille that asks the participant at what their favorite childhood toy was, and then prompts them to share on their Wall.

“The more interactive, the more people enjoy it,” Samit tells us, in support of his company’s product. “I’m all for brands embracing the medium — everything we do on the internet is by choice, not like TV. It’s a lean-to experience. People want to participate. One of our secret sauces is that if we can get you to emote, you’ll want to share. We never charge for that, that’s to incentivize brands to be creative.”

The study released today in collaboration with KN Dimestore was compiled during June and July of 2011, collecting information from a group of 30,000 consumers exposed to SocialVibe incentivized ads across a number of mediums, including social games. Key findings of this study suggest that not only are users more likely to be active participants with incentivized brands, but that users were 161% more likely to visit a brand’s website and 36% more likely to shop for brands at a store location after completing an engagement. Nearly half of the participants (48%) in the study reported that they only clicked on the engagement to get the virtual currency — but wound up staying to actively engage with the brand once the experience started.

“We had a client that produced 5 different videos [for an engagement]. That was unusual,” Samit says, explaining that each video rewarded participants with the exact same amount of in-game currency and that the participant only had to watch one to be eligible. “But users were averaging 93 seconds to complete three videos. They opted in. There was a pause moment — and then they enjoyed it.”

The challenge for SocialVibe now is getting in front of the right users. Through what Samit calls “true targeting,” the most appropriate ad engagements by demographic are only supposed to users that are most likely to opt-in. As an example, he walks us through an engagement that asks participants if they are footballs fans. If the participant says no, they get a completely different experience for the remainder of the engagement than of those who said yes. Beyond that layer, though, it’s up to the social game developers to control where and when the SocialVibe integration occurs.

“The astute game publisher doesn’t integrate us with those customers that are our bread and butter — the hardcore, taking out the wallet gamer,” Samit says. “We’re the alternative that only appears to those other gamers. If you’re the kind of gamer that’s played for 90 days and hasn’t taken out your wallet… let us monetize [you].”

SocialVibe’s business model is fueled by advertising dollars spent by brands, a portion of which SocialVibe gives to social game publishers with which they integrate the engagement ads. Zynga Global Director of Brand Advertising Manny Anekal once told us that these integrations are very easy to activate in the short-term for upcoming film or DVD releases, explaining that the Toy Story 3 SocialVibe integration took less than a week to work into FarmVille. As for the returns on investment for the brands, Samit says in the evolving market for digital advertising, incentivized ads in social games are far more effective and less wasteful than traditional banner ads.

“Impressions are completely useless,” he says. “There are ways to load up pages with all sorts of stuff that we have tuned out. You are more likely to summit Everest in your lifetime than to ever click on a banner.”

SocialVibe closed a $20 million second round of funding from Norwest Venture Partners last March, bring its total funding up to $45 million. You can check out its lists of brands and partners on the company’s website.

TapJoy offers monetization services for social and mobile gaming applications.

Adknowledge offers advertisers alternatives to traditional search engine advertising.

maudau helps companies cross-promote their applications.

6waves is an international publisher and developer of gaming applications on the Facebook platform.

Peak Games is a provider of social games for users in the EMEA region.

Brighter Option helps launch, monitor, and optimize Facebook advertising campaigns.

Kontagent is a developer of analytics solutions for social application developers.

JunglePay is a mobile payment solution for web sites, mobile sites and applications.

RightScale provides cloud computing management for social application and game developers.

AdParlor is an official Facebook Ads API Partner and manages large-scale Facebook advertising campaigns, acquisition campaigns for social game developers and fan growth campaigns for large brands and agencies.

SoftLayer provides cloud and dedicated hosting services for social application and game developers.

Viximo provides social networks with social applications and gaming platforms.

This additional placement of Sponsored Stories will improve the ability of advertisers to reach gamers, which could be especially useful for developers looking to gain new users. However, to make the ticker’s sponsored app discovery stories as appealing as possible, Facebook will need to show them about friends that users trust as wise, active gamers.

Reaching the Right Audience

Facebook released Sponsored Stories in January as a new way for advertisers to serve highly relevant ads promoting their Facebook properties. The ads show which of a user’s friends have recently Liked a Page or Page’s updates, used an app or game, or shared content from a Facebook-integrated website, amplifying the reach of what were news feed stories.

Until the launch of the App Ticker earlier this month, Sponsored Stories only appeared in the ads sidebar to users browsing Facebook. Now, gamers will see entries in their App Ticker marked “Sponsored”. These are in fact the same Sponsored Stories, albeit in a condensed format that just shows the name and face of a user’s friend and the title of an app or game they’ve used, but no image of the app or game. Sponsored Stories about Pages and websites may also appear in the App Ticker, though we’ve only seen ones about apps and games so far.

Previously, developers could try to gain new gamers through App Used, Game Played, and App Share Sponsored Stories, but these would be shown to all users including those who rarely or never played games. They could target Sponsored Stories about one of their apps to users of another app they controlled, but otherwise trying to reach gamers was less predictable.

With placement in a new channel that only reaches gamers, these types of Sponsored Stories are now more likely to reach their intended audience and drive installs from users with better monetization potential down the line.

Promoting Usage of Trusted Gamers

Inexperienced gamers might be lured to try out a new app just because any of their friends have installed it. However, developers are trying to draw hardcore social gamers with the most monetization potential. These users know which of their friends are actually active players that can be relied upon to accept requests and cooperate in games, in other words which friends’ implicit game recommendations through Sponsored Stories can be trusted.

Therefore, Facebook may need to refine its targeting and display algorithms for App Ticker Sponsored Stories so that game usage of these trusted gamer friends is more frequently displayed. These might not necessarily be a user’s closest friends with regards to social signals such as Likes of each other’s news feed posts or tags in the same photos. Instead the App Ticker Sponsored Stories should highlight friends who accept a user’s game requests, frequently interact in-game through gifting, visiting, and competitive activities, and play the most games.

Along with determining what friends have Sponsored Stories about them appear in the ticker, these algorithm tweaks could determine which friend’s photo is displayed in Sponsored Stories when the names of multiple friends that have used an app are listed.

If Facebook can surface trusted gamers in App Ticker Sponsored Stories, developers buying them will see better performance. This could make the ticker an important paid growth channel in addition to driving free, organic growth, leading developers to spend more on the social ad unit.

Josh Constine contributed to this article.

Walk-throughs and strategies for using Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad unit can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

Zynga Japan Shuts Down FarmVille & Treasure Isle —

EA Uses Debt to Pay for PopCap — EA states that it will use $550 million in convertible debt to finance part of its recent PopCap purchase. As noted by VentureBeat, this is likely to allow for greater financial flexibility when it comes to making further acquisitions.

Ubisoft Buys Owlient — Core games developer Ubisoft has purchased web games developer Owlient. The acquisition is part of Ubisoft’s strategy to expand its games onto the web, social networks, and mobile spaces.

SponsorPay Launches BrandEngage to Drive Engagement & Monetization — Social advertising platform SponsorPay released a new product called BrandEngage this week. The service allows social game and app developers to enhance user engagement and monetization in their titles by integrating cost-per-engagement campaigns on Facebook and other social networks.

Kontagent Expands Analytics Platform — Earlier this week, Kontagent expanded its social analytics platform beyond games and apps on the Facebook platform with kSuite. Now, game developers for both the web and mobile platforms will be able utilize demographic data based on location, age groups, gender, engagement, and so on in real time.

Round of Funding Raised for deal united — The payments company behind PAY.BY.SHOPPING, deal united, has announced the ending of a Series B financing round led by Tengelmann E-Commerce Beteiligungs GmbH. Also participating were Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, KFW Bankengruppe, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Venture Incubator. Though the exact amount raised was not noted, the proceeds are stated to be used for expanding global brand awareness.

EMI Signs Deal With Social Games Publisher MXP4 — Major record label EMI has signed a deal with social games publisher MXP4 says the Guardian. Through the deal, EMI will provide music from various artists to sell within MXP4′s Bopler Games app on Facebook. Sixty seconds of songs will be free, but Facebook Credits will be required to purchase full access.

Sometrics Releases Virtual Currency Infographic — Sometrics has released an infographic regarding its virtual currency services. According to the data, the majority of virtual currency purchases they’ve seen since has derived from the MMOG at 43 percent, followed by casual and social games at 35 percent. Additionally, credit cards make up the primary payment method at 53 percent with the most active spending day being Friday.

[Launch] Kabam Releases New Dragons of Atlantis Content — Social developer Kabam has announced the release of new content for its Facebook title, Dragon’s of Atlantis. High level players will now be able to further upgrade their Fortress with new looks and abilities as well as be able to gain access to a new combat class, the Fire Dragon.

Cow Clicker Runs Amusing Campaign — Facebook application Cow Clicker is running an amusing promotion to “Save The Pigs” by clicking cows in their game. Poking fun at Angry Birds, the app provides an amusingly written “open letter” detailing the entire predicament.