Angry Birds Summer Pignic was the first game in the Seasons series that had not been released in line with a holiday. At the time of release, the Seasons game had a Halloween, Christmas, Valentines, St Patricks and an Easter game, but nothing to celebrate a season even though Christmas and Easter obviously to some point represented Winter and Spring respectively.
Released on all platforms on the 21st June 2011, which was summer solstice (the longest day), the game worked in the same way as the Christmas version (angry birds seasons greedings) with 30 different levels that could be played as each day passed rather than when you finished the last level. This meant that by rights if the game was downloaded after the 21st July 2011, then the levels could be played from 30 to 1 rather than the other way around. With this being said, the game did keep to its increasing level of difficulty system that had been used on all the previous games.
Facebook Campaign
This was the first game that was announced on Facebook rather than in the press, on the developer’s website or at a gaming convention. The reasoning for this is simple, at the moment Angry Birds has over 10 million followers on Facebook. This meant that reaching these 10 million self-professed fans of the game via Facebook was much easier and cheaper than any other way.
Merchandise and Branding
By this time, Angry Birds had a successful string of games. In fact, based on the amount of copies downloaded it was the most played game in the world by a long way. If you combined the sales figures of Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas on the PS2, Gran Turismo on the PS1, Nintendogs on the DS, all the Pokémon games on the Game Boy Advance, Tetris on the original Gameboy, Mario Kart on the Wii and Halo 3 on the X Box, then you would still need to times that number by three to reach the number of times Angry Birds had been downloaded.
These figures showed that there was a large market for Angry Birds. This meant that if other Angry Birds items were released, then they would probably be a success. This is the main reason why merchandise started to retail at this point.
This game was one of the biggest games around because of the way it was announced and the amount of levels that were available. Furthermore, due to the release of official merchandise, this game retailed more copies than expected because the merchandise was causing people to talk about the game.