Electronic Arts is closing three of its Facebook games made by its Playfish development studio, including one which at one point had 10 million daily active users. EA said today that The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society will shut down on June 14th.
In today"s blog post, EA stated the reason for the decision:
After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off. For people who have seen other recent shutdowns of social games, perhaps this is not surprising.
Gamasutra stated that The Sims Social had as many as 10 million users in 2011 but that number has gone down to just 500,000 users today. Pet Society has about that many players and SimCity Social now has between 100,000 and 500,000 players.
All three games were developed by Playfish, which EA acquired for $300 million in 2009. At the time, Playfish had its headquarters in London, with offices in San Francisco, Beijing and Tromso, Norway. EA currently has no comment on the status of Playfish and its studios, according to Joystiq.
The shutdowns of these once popular titles shows that Facebook-based gaming has lost much of its popularity in the last couple of years. It"s looking like these kinds of games are more of a one-time fad rather than the start of a new gaming platform.
Source: EA | Image via EA