Mobsters (Playdom)

» see apps.facebook.com/mobsters as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

myspace was the kind of thing american teenagers and twentysomethings used for music and a friends list. it was not my crowd. in turkey the same window meant msn for chat and hi5 for the friends list (which i did not use). the only myspace pages i ever opened were the band ones embedded in someone's wall post.

playdom launched mobsters on the myspace app platform in july 2008. the platform had been open about a year and the gold-rush was on. the game was a clicker, you spent stamina to pull jobs, you spent energy to fight other players' mob crews. the round loop took fifteen seconds and reset on a timer, which is the entire shape of the early social game (or so the writeups say).

mobsters hit 13.5 million installs across myspace inside the first months and reached the top app slot in september 2008. playdom raised venture rounds on that number. mobsters 2 launched in 2009 with better art and a facebook port followed. disney announced the playdom acquisition for around 763 million dollars on 27 july 2010. about a year later, on 1 september 2011, the facebook version of mobsters was shut down by the studio's new owner.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

this happened more in the american college-dorm internet than where i pretty much was. the social-gaming pitch around 2008 was that a game on a friend graph could grow for free. you invited your friends to be in your crew. your crew brought their crews, the install number doubled inside a week. mobsters and mafia wars chased the same loop on competing platforms (close enough). for whatever reason the mafia theme was the one that hit first, with farms coming later.

playdom built out a catalog around the same skeleton. sorority life, bola, wild ones, big city life. by 2010 the studio had around 42 million monthly active users across its games. that number, more than anything else, is what disney bought.

~ the day it died ~

the disney era was short for mobsters. the post-acquisition portfolio review picked which games stayed and which ones got the wind-down notice. on 1 september 2011 the facebook app stopped accepting new players and existing crews stopped being able to log in. the myspace version held on a little longer but the platform itself was already collapsing into ed kaminski's legacy traffic.

back then. zynga had won the facebook game category and mafia wars was the survivor in the mafia genre. mobsters 2 had not built a sustainable graph. disney did not need a second mafia clicker. the studio shifted its weight toward the disney brands the corporate side actually cared about and the original mobsters became a closed app id.

~ the long tail ~

disney closed playdom proper in 2016 after writing the bulk of the acquisition off. the wider social-gaming category did not survive the move to mobile-first either, mafia wars itself shut down in 2016 too. the unofficial revival sites are still running in 2026, on private servers, with maybe a few hundred players who remember the original loop.

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