EA shutting down Playfish games
Publisher pulling plug on division's last remaining Facebook titles; SimCity Social, The Sims Social, Pet Society, more closing by mid-June
Electronic Arts acquired Playfish for $300 million in late 2009. This weekend, the publisher revealed plans to shut down all remaining Playfish games.
In a series of Playfish forum posts, an EA community manager has announced that SimCity Social, The Sims Social, and Pet Society will all be shutting down on June 14. Those will be preceded by the closures of Madden NFL Superstars 11 & 12 and NHL Superstars, both of which will end on May 14. Those are the last remaining active Playfish games, but EA will retain a Facebook presence with games like Bejeweled Blitz.
"We know that you may be disappointed by this," the SimCity Social announcement reads. "Retiring games is never easy, we hope you've enjoyed playing SimCity Social as much as we enjoyed making it. Thank you to all of our passionate and dedicated players for supporting SimCity Social. We hope to see you in some of our other titles on Facebook and other platforms."
All of the shuttered games received essentially the same post, with text changes to reflect the name of the game, the date of closure, and the in-game currency. Each posting says EA is shutting down the game in question so it can "reallocate development resources" to other titles. As for in-game currency and Playfish cash cards, EA is telling players to spend them before the games are retired. The cash cards will seemingly have no use after June 14, as players will have to talk to EA customer service about any unredeemed cards after that date.
Though all of the games are shutting down alongside one another, they have enjoyed widely varying lifespans. SimCity Social enjoyed the briefest tenure, having launched just last year. On the other hand, Pet Society launched in 2008, and was one of the company's biggest hits heading into the EA acquisition.
The EA acquisition was structured to pay out $275 million in cash, $25 million in equity for key employee retention, and up to $100 million in additional payments if performance targets were met by the end of 2011. Playfish met enough of those performance targets to earn $50 million out of that possible $100 million.
UPDATE: Electronic Arts released a statement about the closures, saying, "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."
It went on to note that it will primarily offer Facebook games now through its PopCap brand. While it didn't give details, EA's statement did say that players of the shuttered games would be made a special offer to encourage them to try a PopCap title.
CORRECTION: This article originally referred to The Simpsons: Tapped Out as a Facebook game when it is actually a mobile game. We regret the error.
e.g. http://forum.playfish.com/showthread.php?t=2968221
Sarcasm aside, this just antagonises the casual gamer group that EA were until recently talking about courting so effectively.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Nick McCrea on 15th April 2013 5:15pm
Mr Bowen, I'll be joining you in the Rose Garden Arcade for some good old Gauntlet. Co-Op and in person, as that's the way is should be played...
Social gaming like this is a service, not a product. So the whole business model is different and requires different attitudes and skills.
Each game is a community that has to be properly engaged with and managed. The community put huge emotional and financial investment into their game, which means that the publisher has a moral as well as a commercial responsibility. They just cannot behave with a cavalier attitude.
The wonderful thing about games like this is that they can and should evolve over time to reflect the wants, needs and demands of their community. This is what metrics are for. So any cessation of a game should either be from the publishers failings and the subsequent defection of the community or from being stuck on a burning platform. Is Facebook a burning platform? If not then what went wrong here?
Monetisation in FTP is an art that has exploded on our industry from nowhere. So unsurprisingly most people are getting it wrong. There needs to be a balance between publisher greed and giving the community value. But at the same time business models must work in order to sustain the publisher. It can be done and it can be done well, as World of Tanks so eminently proves. But the reality is that the vast majority of us right now are on very steep learning curves. And even the mighty of our industry, like EA, obviously still don't get it. But they are not the only ones, most traditional boxed product publishers are failing to make the intellectual shift to keep up with where their customers have gone.
When Kristian Segerstrĺle sold Playfish he said that it was a reverse takeover of EA. And so it should have been. It was an opportunity to re-engineer EA to keep up with the market. But very obviously the whole project failed. No wonder that both Kristian and John Riccitiello both recently left the company.
Even Hitler made a holiday park. Strength through joy!
That aside fingers crossed that this doesn't affect too many peoples jobs - I fear cuts could be heavy, unless of course people are moved to new projects.
A classic case of "Pump and dump" by EA. They're notorious for acquiring labels, draining them of all profit for as long as they can, and then closing down the games. How many times does a player have to be told not to play this type of scam? Why are they always surprised when it happens?
It's EA's classic MO, and you can foretell the future of any other 'online' games they have right now: Sim City, anyone?
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Mary Hilton on 16th April 2013 11:48am
Hopefully, they get something decent in the way of a severance package, but I don't know what sort of job security they had in the first place..
Any games developer would kill for the current traffic on The Sims Social (500k DAUs) and even Pet Society (100k DAUs) but for EA, business is business and it has set the floor for its own ROI which these two titles must be falling through.
"I know it's only a game but I am disappointed in EA. Guess my gaming days are numbered. Knowing that the maker can pull the plug at any time, I'm not encouraged to "try something new". What? Try something new so you can turn that game off in six months too? No thanks."
If any game may be shut down anytime, how can any player trust the games enough to spend actual money?
Any first semester business student learns that acquiring new customers is 5 times more expensive than keeping current ones...
The gaming landscape is currently littered with bodies and fallen detritus of the fallen admist the everychanging daily landscape - its difficult to see if there will be patches of stability with the background of global economic reform and global political tensions
On facebook, you just need to log in to see how much less its being used by people in the developed countries these days. Whilst I occasionally still log in with ad blocker running on a PC, I've totally ditched the mobile app due to the sheer amount of junk and spam. I'm not sure how you keep monetising what might otherwise be a decent game, on a mediocre platform with an ever increasing amount of spam. There's only so many amputee elephants one can take.