The Sims Social

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

~ the last words ~

i had a facebook account by 2008 but i never opened the games tab. the sims social crossed my feed in 2011 as wall posts asking me to send someone a virtual painting or unblock a room, and i clicked "hide all from this app" in the same way i had already hidden farmville and mafia wars in the two years before. this was the last big facebook game i actively refused to install.

ea announced the sims social at e3 in june 2011 and shipped it two months later on 9 august. the pitch was clean: the sims franchise, which had sold well over a hundred million copies on the pc since 2000, adapted to the facebook social loop. build a sim, decorate a house, visit your friends' sims and interact with them for skill points. playfish built the game in london using the same design vocabulary they had used for pet society and restaurant city. the launch trajectory was aggressive. sixteen million players registered in the first week. by early 2012 the game had crossed sixty-five million registered accounts.

then it fell apart. by april 2013 monthly active players had dropped to around five hundred thousand from a peak north of ten million. the community forums documented an accumulating layer of bugs that the shrinking playfish team could no longer patch fast enough: missing rewards, stuck quests, phantom simcash charges, items that vanished from inventory. ea announced on 15 april 2013 that the sims social would shut down on 14 june, alongside simcity social and pet society. the servers actually closed a few days later than that.

~ the record ~

~ the loop that broke ~

the sims social used the same energy-and-timer mechanic as most 2011-era facebook games. each interaction with a sim cost energy, energy regenerated over real time, or you could buy simcash to skip the wait. the design borrowed from the pc sims but removed the open-ended sandbox part. what was left was a chore list of scheduled actions that had to be triggered daily to maintain relationship scores with your neighbors. the loop was faithful to the format but not faithful to the franchise. the pc sims had always been a game about ambient absurdity, the facebook version was a game about clicking icons on cooldown.

it won social networking game of the year at the interactive achievement awards in february 2012, which was already a lagging indicator. by then the facebook canvas was in the middle of the collapse that would take the whole category down. zuckerberg's team had turned off newsfeed spam broadcast for games in late 2011 and reduced the surface area for install prompts through 2012. player acquisition costs quadrupled inside a year. the sims social lost its viral loop while the bugs multiplied and the playfish team was already being reallocated to mobile.

~ how it ended ~

ea's official statement on 15 april 2013 was that "after millions of people initially logged in to play, the number of players and amount of activity had fallen off". the trade press read this as a corporate way of saying that the whole facebook-canvas category had died and ea was cutting the last three playfish titles to redirect the team toward mobile. the wind-down was clean. paid users got a refund window for unspent simcash. the servers closed on 14 june 2013, three days behind schedule in the case of pet society, on schedule for the sims social itself.

one detail the shutdown post did not mention: the game held over a year of user-created inventories and house designs. none of that was exportable. facebook games in 2013 had no equivalent of the sims 2 save file that you could carry between machines. when the servers went dark, every house on every account went with them.

~ what got left ~

the sims mobile shipped in 2018 and lasted longer, and the pc franchise continued through the sims 4 and beyond. the facebook branch of the family was closed. there is a pattern here that repeats across every ea social-game project of the 2011 to 2013 window: the games were built to be evergreen operations, the platform under them changed the rules mid-run, and the whole studio infrastructure that produced them was dismantled once the platform bet failed.

the wikipedia article on the sims social lists the game as "closed". the wayback machine has a few screenshots of the load screen. the actual game is unrecoverable, the same as every other server-tethered social game from that period.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »