Restaurant City

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

~ the obit ~

Playfish opened Restaurant City for public beta on Facebook on 28 April 2009. You got an empty room with a counter and a door, and the job was to turn it into somewhere other people would visit. The studio that made it was about eighteen months old at the time and already had one enormous hit in Pet Society.

What separated it from the other management games of that year was the staffing. Your waiters and cooks were people from your friends list, rendered with their real names and profile pictures, and they kept earning while you were logged out. Ingredients came out of a garden you planted yourself. The recipe list only opened up if you had grown the right things or traded for them with somebody who had.

EA bought Playfish on 9 November 2009 for $400 million, six months after the game launched and more or less at the top of its curve. Over eighteen million people were playing Restaurant City every month that winter. By May 2011 it was down to around six million, and by the spring of 2012 under two million. That is an ordinary shape for a Facebook game of that generation and a fatal one under a publisher who counts them.

The notice went up on 1 May 2012. A Playfish community manager wrote that on 29 June EA would retire Restaurant City on Facebook and Restaurant City: Gourmet Edition on iPhone and iPad. That was the announcement in full. Two months of warning, then both versions off on the same day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the staff were your friends ~

The friend-as-employee mechanic was the engine of the whole category, and Restaurant City ran it about as literally as anyone did. Hiring somebody meant sending them a request. Growing your menu meant asking your list for ingredients you did not have. A player who refused to invite anyone hit a ceiling within a few weeks, which was the design working exactly as intended.

Playfish's own numbers made the point. Fifty-five million monthly players across the whole catalog at the 2010 high, which no studio reaches by making games people play alone. When Facebook throttled app notifications and rebuilt how canvas games could reach a feed, the engine stopped, and every title built on it started shedding users at roughly the same rate.

~ the notification layer ~

Facebook in Turkey between 2009 and 2011 was busier than anything that had come before it, and the games arrived attached to it. Restaurant City reached me the way all of them did, as requests from people I actually knew, sitting in the same notification list as birthdays and tagged photos. I did not run a restaurant. The invitations were still a daily condition of using the site, and finding the setting that turned them off was something most people here learned early.

~ what happened to the money ~

Cooking Cash was the paid currency, bought with real money, and on shutdown day whatever players had left of it was converted into SimCash and deposited in The Sims Social. That was EA moving spenders from a dying title to a living one rather than issuing refunds.

The Sims Social was switched off on 14 June 2013, on the same day EA closed the rest of the Playfish catalog. So the compensation for Restaurant City closing outlived Restaurant City by less than twelve months, and then went into the same hole.

~ the fan servers ~

Because the game was a Flash client talking to Playfish servers, the shutdown took the whole thing with it and left almost nothing behind. The Lost Media Wiki still files it as partially found, assembled out of screenshots and video captures rather than anything playable.

What exists instead is reconstruction. Fans have spent more than a decade rebuilding the game from memory, most durably as Food Friends, which is somebody else's code approximating a restaurant that EA deleted. Fourteen years on, people are still trying to get the ingredient garden right.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »