When Electronic Arts purchased Playfish in late 2009 for $400 million, the social game startup was riding high with millions of monthly active users across Facebook games like Restaurant City, Pet Society, and Country Story. Just three and a half years later, the company is all but nonexistent, as its final original game, Pet Society, will be shut down on June 14.

Facebook game closures are nothing new, but typically, developers release new games as they shutter underperforming titles. With Playfish, and in fact most of EA’s social division, it seems as though the Facebook platform is being abandoned entirely (The Sims Social and SimCity Social are also being closed this month, as we reported earlier). What does this mean for Playfish’s future? (more…)

Zynga today let go 18 percent of its employees (approximately 520 people) after shutting down its Los Angeles, Dallas and New York City studios. The studios that were shut down was first reported by AllThingsD. A small portion of the 18 percent were let go from Zynga’s Los Angeles office, which saw 55 employees losing their jobs, according to a tweet from an artist at the Los Angeles studio. Empires & Allies, the first game for Facebook from the Los Angeles studio, will be shut down on June 17.The layoffs and cost cuts will be completed by August.

According to a release from Zynga, the move will result in an estimated $70 million to $80 million in pre-tax annualized cash expense savings.

In February, Zynga closed it’s Baltimore studio as well as relocated its Mckinney, Texas and downtown Austin offices to its Dallas and North Austin Offices. The New York City offices saw consolidation as well, with the staff moving to the New York City mobile studio before being completely shut down today. In October 2012, Zynga laid off more than 100 employees, axing employees from its Chicago office, while completely closing down its Boston office. (more…)

Namco appears to be shutting down its various Facebook games as of March 19, 2013.

The developer known for its classic arcade and mainstream video games has a small selection of social titles available on Facebook. Each of these games, Pac-Man S, Rally-X S, Dig Dug S and Letter Labyrinth S are all based on older IP. However, when one goes to Pac-Man S, the following message pops up when the game loads.

Rally-X S, Dig Dug S and Letter Labyrinth S all contain similar messages revealing the games will go down on March 19. Our traffic-tracking service AppData reveals the reason these games are all being closed: None of them have much traffic. Indeed, between all its games, AppData estimates Namco only has 4,285 daily active users (the best measurement of a core audience).

Even though Namco’s classic arcade IP has a devoted following among the generation that grew up with it, these titles never really took off on Facebook. AppData shows Pac-Man S peaked early in its cycle with a little over 18,000 DAU immediately after it launched in June 2011. None of Namco’s other games even cracked 10,000 DAU at their highest traffic points.

What will be interesting to see is if Namco tries to cycle in any of its other IP to take the place of these titles. The company has a robust mobile catalog with a wide variety of games that appeal to classic, core and casual gamers.

We’re attempting to get in touch with Namco for a comment. Developing.

The social adaptation of Sid Meiers’ hailed Civilization series, CivWOrld, is shutting down.

The announcement was made via the game’s Facebook page:

Rulers of great civilizations, repent! The world is coming to an end! CivWorld will shortly cease operations and flow into the ethers, forever a fond memory of great triumphs. The last day for players to get more CivBucks using Facebook Credits will be April 2nd, 2013. The last day Civ World will be accessible is May 29th, 2013. We thank you for the time you spent with CivWorld, and beseech you to stay civilized on the other side.

After nearly a year and a half in development, CivWorld came to Facebook in a closed alpha all the way back in January 2011 and was fully-launched on the social network by that May. Although the game’s been in existence for two years now, it never really seemed to find an audience.

That said, the game’s managed to last quite a bit longer than other social tie-ins for established game franchises. Recent examples include the shutdown of EA’s Dragon Age: Legends and Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Commander. The Civilization titles are known for having a dedicated community of players who will regularly play them for years after their release, something that may have helped CivWorld last as long as it did.

CivWorld peaked in July 2011 with 88,754 daily active users (the best gauge of a title’s core audience on Facebook), but the numbers quickly dropped off after that. By January 2012, there were only 5,000 DAU and AppData estimates the game only has 2,000 now.

As part of its new “disciplined” management of its game portfolio, Zynga CFO Mark Vranesh revealed Zynga would be shutting down three titles it recently launched: CityVille 2, The Friend Game, and Party Place.

“CityVille 2 missed our expectations despite pushing the envelope in 3D gaming and both The Friend Game and Party Place failed to achieve the mass market appeal Zynga franchise are known for,” Vranesh said during today’s earnings call.

CityVille 2 launched in November 2012, but its user numbers drastically fell off during the month of December. We noticed the change at the end of December and reached out to Zynga for comment, but never heard back about what was going on with the game. This marks an even shorter lifecycle than The Ville, which also saw a massive loss in users following its launch, but is still playable on Facebook.

The shutdown follows the recent departure of Brian Reynolds from Zynga, whose game studio handled CityVille 2′s development. Although it wasn’t publicly addressed during the call, it would make sense to assume that Reynolds leaving Zynga and CityVille 2′s closure are somehow connected.

As a cost-cutting measure, Zynga’s become much less willing to keep underperforming games in operation. Last quarter, the company announced it was shutting down a total of 13 titles, both on the web and mobile platforms.

Kabam is shutting down its vampire-themed core score social game, Thirst of Night.

The announcement was made via an email sent out to the game’s players, revealing the game (which is still technically in beta) will be shut down on Thursday, Jan. 31; this includes taking all of the title’s servers offline. According to the shutdown FAQ, players will no longer be able to buy hard currency Rubies and the Thirst of Night Payments System has been turned off.

If players have Rubies left over, Kabam is offering to transfer the last six months of Ruby purchases (up to $5,000) to one of its other games. Kingdoms of Camelot will be the default title the developer will transfer players’ accounts to, but players can contact the Thirst of Night team if they want to have their account transferred to a different game.

Thirst of Night is one of Kabam’s older games, having been a flagship title that was available on Pokki’s platform, Google+ and as a full-screen downloadable app from Download.com. Interestingly enough, though, the game never came to Facebook, so it’s not possible to use our AppData traffic tracking service to investigate its traffic levels. However, the majority of Kabam’s revenue comes from off-Facebook sources (like its iOS hit with Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle For The North), so it’s not surprising Kabam never brought it to the social network.

Core social games shut down by larger developers typically have fewer than 50,000 daily active users, but can stick around for quite some time with even fewer (witness: Dragon Age Legends managed to limp along for quite some time with 10,000 DAU before EA announced its closure). On the site providing details about the shutdown, Kabam mentions Thirst of Night’s “declining lifespan”, so it’s likely the game’s audience had shrunk to similar numbers.

For more information about the shutdown and what options are available for users looking to continue onto other Kabam titles, users can visit the official closure FAQ.

Tiny Speck has announced it is shutting down its social MMO Glitch. The game will turn off at 8 AM PST on Dec. 9.

The announcement was made on the official Glitch website, noting the site and forums will stay online through the end of the year so players will still be able to communicate with each other. Glitch HQ, the Glitch API and any third party applications that rely on the Glitch API will no longer be available after the site is shuttered. Likewise, Tiny Speck is giving out refunds for recent purchases.

According to Tiny Speck, Glitch is being closed down because it “has not attracted an audience large enough to sustain itself and based on a long period of experimentation and our best estimates, it seems unlikely that it ever would. And, given the prevailing technological trends — the movement towards mobile and especially the continued decline of the Flash platform on which Glitch was built — it was unlikely to do so before its time was up.”

Glitch caught our interest back in April 2011, shortly after Tiny Speck closed a $10.7 million round of fundraising. The game impressed us at the time with how it planned to use mobile components to add to its main open web gameplay mechanics, as well as providing extra sources of revenue. The idea was to utilize paid iOS and Android mini-game apps, as well as an API that let players incorporate artwork from Glitch elsewhere.

Tiny Speck is still going to operate on a smaller scale. Even though much of the Glitch team is moving on to find other work, Tiny Speck has developed “some unique messaging technology with applications outside of the gaming world and a smaller core team will be working to develop new products.”

Update: A Bit Lucky CEO Frederic Descamps tells us, ”We are indeed closing our FB games to focus exclusively on Solstice Arena and the promise of real time transplatform multiplayer games.” The original article is below.

A Bit Lucky’s railroad sim Lucky Train and its sci-fi title Lucky Space have both vanished from Facebook and user comments imply the games have been shut down.

Even though A Bit Lucky’s website prominently advertises Lucky Train and Lucky Space and invites users to play them on its front page,  clicking on the links results in an error message and the games no longer appears as a result when conducting a Facebook search. Meanwhile, both games’ app pages on Facebook are currently peppered with dozens of comments from players bemoaning the game’s shutdown.

It’s not clear if A Bit Lucky or Facebook is responsible for the games’ takedown. Investigating the forums on Facebook shows Lucky Train users were given some advanced notice about the game being taken offline, but commenters are blaming Facebook and A Bit Lucky equally. Players put together an online petition to keep the game online, but it looks like this endeavor wasn’t successful since it closed yesterday and the game’s nowhere to be found.

We’ve reached out to A Bit Lucky about the disappearances, and will update the story if we hear back. When we last heard from the developer, development was underway for a multiplatform game called Solstice Arena, though nothing new has been announced since June.

Our traffic-tracking service AppData shows Lucky Train debuted on Facebook in June 2010, peaking that November with 335,000 daily active users. Since then, the game’s traffic steadily dropped until it leveled out at 40,000 DAU in October 2011. Subsequent occasional user fall-off has the game currently sitting at the 10,000 DAU mark. Lucky Space contains even smaller numbers: Over the past month, it’s dropped from 1,000 DAU to 600.