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. For people who have seen other recent shutdowns of social games, perhaps this is not surprising." 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. 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.ĬORRECTION: This article originally referred to The Simpsons: Tapped Out as a Facebook game when it is actually a mobile game. We regret the error.Free-to-play social games are an interesting oxymoron. Whether you're paying with money, marketing bombardment, or time, they aren't free.
And in most cases, they aren't especially social, unless your definition of socializing is pestering your friends for resources and then inviting them over to show off all the stuff you've bought or made with those resources. But going beyond cute semantics, there are some deeper tensions inherent to the genre, ones that have become increasingly clear as the bad news surrounding the sector piles up.