Hope you weren’t building a simulated life on Facebook, because Electronic Arts is pulling a couple of Sims titles off of the platform.
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EA provided the following statement:
Today we are informing players of the difficult decision to retire some of our Facebook games: The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society.
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.
EA will continue to deliver popular titles for Facebook, most notably games from PopCap, including Bejeweled Blitz, Solitaire Blitz and the recently announced Plants vs. Zombies Adventures.
These kinds of shutdowns aren’t uncommon in the social-game space. Zynga, one of the biggest publishers in the market, closed down nearly a dozen games in late December. In February, Zynga canceled CityVille 2, only three months after debuting it on Facebook.
EA still has many Facebook games available — that includes digital board games like Scrabble, Monopoly Millionaires, and Risk: Factions. As its statement implies, it also has a major developer that knows the casual audience in PopCap, but today’s closures reveal that no game is safe in the volatile and fickle social gaming sector.