Several of Electronic Arts’ social titles, all of which are from the company’s Playfish developer, are on the chopping block.
The axe is scheduled to fall on 14 June this year, taking Facebook games The Sims Social, Pet Society and SimCity Social with it. There don’t appear to be any sinister reasons for the closure, as EA tells it “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.”
Electronic Arts won’t be pulling out of the Facebook/social gaming sphere entirely though, they still have several titles from their PopCap development house on the go. EA seems to be quite keen on transferring existing Playfish players to one of the PopCap titles and will be announcing a promotional offer soon that they hope will facilitate the move for at least a few social gamers.
Source: Engadget