Pet Society

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

~ the obituary ~

i had a facebook account by 2008 but i did not play the games on it. pet society showed up in my feed as wall posts from people i half-knew, with screenshots of an oversized cartoon pet hugging another cartoon pet. i never clicked. the whole facebook-game category was something i scrolled past for five years until the wall-post broadcast was finally turned off by facebook itself.

anyway, playfish was a london studio founded in 2007 by kristian segerstrale and four other ex-electronic-arts europeans. their thesis was that the facebook platform, which had opened to third-party apps in may '07, was about to become the largest casual game distribution channel in the world, and that the team that figured out the social loop first would win. they shipped a string of small games (who has the biggest brain, geo challenge, word challenge) in '07 and '08, then pet society in september '08.

pet society hit. fifty million monthly players by 2010, five million daily, item sales running at about a hundred thousand dollars a day according to playfish's own numbers in the press. ea bought the whole studio in november '09 for about three hundred million dollars upfront and another installment of two hundred million tied to performance milestones. the deal was reported in the same news cycle as the zynga ipo runway, and the press framing was that ea had bought its way into the social-game business at the price of the entire console budget for one project.

ea wound down most of playfish on 14 september '12 and announced the pet society shutdown the same month. the servers closed on 18 june '13, three days behind the announced 14 june date, with no public explanation for the delay. the most-cited reason in the trade press was that ea was repointing its social-gaming resources at mobile, where zynga had also been losing money for two years and the facebook-platform thesis had already broken.

~ the case file ~

~ how it played ~

the loop was small and worked. you woke up, you logged in, your pet was dirty and hungry. you washed it in a small bathtub, fed it from the fridge, brushed its hair. each action gave you coins and paw points. coins bought clothes and furniture from the in-game shops. paw points leveled the pet up. you visited your friends' pet houses, left them a gift, signed their guestbook. the game wanted you to come back every day for the daily care actions, and most players did.

the monetization was the soft sell. coins were earned through play but a parallel currency, playfish cash, was bought with real money and unlocked premium items: limited-edition outfits and seasonal furniture. the limited-edition mechanic ran a small cadence of weekly drops that drove the hundred-thousand-dollar daily figure playfish liked to quote. the cash items were cosmetic. the game would not gate progress behind paid currency, which was the design choice that separated playfish from the zynga catalog at the time.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is that pet society outperformed farmville on retention for the first eighteen months. zynga had the headline numbers, playfish had the per-user revenue. ea bought the smaller studio for the better economics. then ea spent the next three years trying to figure out how to scale playfish without breaking what made it work, gave up around 2012, and folded the catalog. the post-mortem write-ups in the trade press were unanimous that ea had paid for a culture and then dismantled the culture.

kristian segerstrale left ea in 2012, started a second studio, then ended up as ceo of super evil megacorp on the mobile moba side. the playfish brand never came back. the wikipedia article on the company lists eighteen shipped games, all dead.

~ the long tail ~

some of the original art and design team kept the audience warm with a successor mobile game called pet society vacation that ea had quietly shipped in 2011, then a long fan-built revival attempt called pet paradise that surfaced on the app store in 2023 with the same six-pet character archetypes and a slightly different name on every menu. the spiritual descendant is more or less the entire genre of cute virtual-pet mobile games that arrived after the facebook canvas died.

the larger pattern is that ea bought playfish at exactly the price point that proved the facebook-canvas-game category had peaked. zynga had its own version of the same arc with cityville and farmville 2. the lesson the trade press wrote up afterward was that platform-dependent game studios are worth less than they look, because the platform owner gets to set the rules and can rewrite the discovery algorithm any quarter. facebook turned off newsfeed game broadcast in 2012. the studio valuations collapsed in the same year.

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