SimCity Social

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

~ the goodbye ~

simcity social launched on facebook on 25 june 2012 and shut down on 14 june 2013. it lived for 355 days. a playfish product with an ea logo on the loading screen and the simcity name on the tab. it was announced at e3 2012 three weeks before launch. by april 2013 ea had already told the press it was closing.

the game was the standard 2012 facebook loop dressed up in a franchise skin. build homes, farms, businesses, factories, then wait for the resource meter to refill or click on a friend's city and send simoleons back. energy, diamonds, materials, fame, experience. time-limited quests that offered exclusive buildings if you logged in that week. the city-simulation part of simcity was mostly gone. what remained was the name and a set of building sprites drawn in the same isometric style as the rest of the playfish catalog.

i had a facebook account by 2008 and simcity was the first pc game i really understood, but i never opened simcity social. by 2012 the facebook games tab was already the part of the site people had stopped clicking. the real simcity was a game you paid for once and ran on your own hardware. this one asked for a login every day and a friend list you were willing to send resource requests to. the two audiences did not overlap.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch year was the same year zynga's stock peaked and started falling. ea had bought playfish for $300 million cash and shares in november 2009, plus $100 million in performance bonuses, and had spent the next three years trying to turn the studio into a facebook counterweight to zynga. the sims social had launched august 2011 and hit 50 million monthly active users inside its first month. simcity social was the sequel to that success on a franchise with even stronger brand recognition. it should have been the safest bet in the catalog.

instead it opened to what forbes and neowin both described as a rush of installs that flattened inside months. the numbers ea reported to the press were about churn rather than acquisition. millions logged in and did not come back. the game had shipped with a small feature set and long resource timers, and the update cadence never caught up to the expectations set by the ea logo on the front.

~ the actual end ~

on 14 april 2013 ea announced the shutdown of simcity social along with the sims social and pet society. the three of them plus playfish itself were closing on the same date, 14 june 2013. the reason ea gave was that these titles no longer met the standard the company wanted its facebook portfolio to hit. what that meant in practice was that facebook had changed its news-feed algorithm in late 2012 and the free viral install channel that had built the whole category had thinned out. paying for facebook ads to acquire players who churned within a week did not close.

players who had spent real money on in-game diamonds were offered no refunds and no export. cities that had taken hundreds of hours to build simply stopped loading on 14 june. simcity social's shutdown page pointed nowhere. the sequel city-builder that ea released for pc in march 2013 (also called simcity, also broken at launch for different reasons) was not offered as a migration path. the two products shared a name and nothing else.

~ the next chapter ~

simcity social was the last new simcity-branded game maxis would ship on facebook. the playfish studio was closed the same day. of the four titles killed in the batch, only pet society had a lasting fan community that tried to keep private servers going. simcity social left almost no trace. its screenshots are hard to find. its wikipedia page is short. the simcity franchise itself would spend the next decade quiet, until the pc reboot and its expansion had run their course. the mobile spinoff simcity buildit released later in 2014 was closer to what simcity social had been trying to do, and outlived it by more than ten years.

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