Aug 26, 2009  Pet Society by Playfish playfishtv. You can enjoy many different games and activities in Pet Society, playing ball, jumping with your skipping rope or going on treasure hunts for coins in the.

'My wife has played Pet Society for almost five years,' writes one supporter who signed Save Pet Society's petition on Change.org. 'Shutting down PetSociety is like someone coming into our house and shooting one of our real cats.

But wasn't that the point of Pet Society, to get you emotionallyinvested?' According to, when the game shut down, one million users played the game at least once a month and 500,000played the game at least once a day. Among them was Selena Inouye, a retired '40-something' who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, three cats and twodogs. She's been playing Pet Society since 2009. Inouye's Pet Society pet was a pink cat. She named her Miss Hiss, after a real stray kitten she found in her backyard and later adopted. Inouye thinks thecomparison between the loss of a virtual pet to the loss of a real pet is 'really fair.' 'I know that some people must think, wow, you people need to get a life, you're crazy, but one of EA's business partners is Disney, and people are crazyabout Disney animated characters,' Inouye said.

'People were crazy about Pet Society too. EA has completely underestimated that, and yeah, a lot of people felt like EAwas killing their pets. They gave us two months, to cope with the loss, I guess.' When I asked Inouye if she spent any money on Pet Society she laughed, a little embarrassed. 'I spent.way too much money. I probably spent.

In the social games industry Inouye is what's called a 'whale,' a term borrowed from the casino industry to describe big spenders.There are a lot of other similarities to be drawn between social games and the gambling industry. Both business models often extract money from players intiny increments and rely on audio-visual feedback to send people into the. In fact, a great number of social games are modeled directly aftercard games and slot machines.

'I'm not so offended,' Inouye said after I told her about the whale designation, 'but then again it makes me wonder too, if people are spending that muchmoney on a 'free-to-play' game, how come EA couldn't keep it running?' .Pet Society was originally developed and operated by small startup Playfish. In November 2009, EA acquired Playfish for $300 million as part of itsaggressive push into the then burgeoning social gaming space.John Earner was Product Manager at Playfish at the time. He said that the game's success caught the team by surprise. 'It just kept growing and growing.

Tiny barbarian dx switch gameplay. Iremember in the early days when it made a $1000 a day we got excited. And then it made $5000, and $10,000. It went from 200,000 players to a million, whichwas amazing, and then it hit six million and it was the biggest game on Facebook. It was the most exciting career ride I've ever been on.' At its peak Pet Society had 50 million monthly players, 5 million daily players and made as much as $100,000 a day by selling in-game items-clothing forthe pets or decorations for their houses.

These were very good numbers at the time, especially for a small team of 18 people. But in the following threeyears Playfish exploded. Studio alone, its central hub and the location that operated Pet Society, grew to 160 people, with almost as manymarketing people as developers, and other, smaller satellite studios elsewhere in the world. Meanwhile, competitors like Zynga started making 10 times as much with FarmVille and growth migrated from Facebook games to mobile games. From EA'sperspective things stopped making as much sense.Feeling the pressure, Playfish made a last ditch effort to save Pet Society and itself. The game was still making money and essentially funding the U.K.studio, but Playfish took as many people as it could and put them on the most promising title, The Sims Social, a Facebook version of one of EA's biggestbrands.This strategy proved tremendously successful when the The Sims Social launched. At its peak it made $500,000 a day, five times what Pet Society made on itsbest day, and many more times than the $30,000 a day Pet Society dropped to by then.At that point EA stepped in and instructed Playfish's U.K.

Studio to hand over Pet Society to a new, small team in Hyderabad, India.' I met those guys,' Earner said, 'They were very sharp, hard working, very intelligent. They very quickly understood the important aspects of Pet Society.They had a core team of five people. They spent the summer in the U.K.

They got to know the Pet Society team, they took the code, they learned how to useit and at the end of the month they flew home.' The intent was to free up the more experienced developers at Playfish U.K. To make new games, and to outsource lower earning games like Pet Society to'lower cost locations'.The biggest expense in operating a Facebook game is the headcount, the people actively working on it; then there's the server costs, where the game ishosted. EA never stated plainly that Pet Society was losing money, even after the move to India, but it had long ceased being the earner it used to be. Itwas unlikely it would ever return to its former glory.John Reseburg, Senior Director of EA Corporate Communications, reiterated to me in an email the general sentiment of EA's April 15 announcement, but withan additional technical detail. 'A few months ago, we made the difficult decision to close down some Facebook titles where player levels had fallen offsignificantly,' he wrote, 'and the aging technology underneath the games was regularly breaking and leading to poor game experiences.'

Earner concurred with the statement. Pet Society was modern at the time of its conception, but it wasn't built to scale up like later Facebook games, and,in a cruel twist, the players' enthusiasm made it a more costly operation. 'At the time we didn't realize that people would own several thousand objects,'Earner said, 'the servers weren't architected for it, so Pet Society started having high server costs per active user.' Yet none of these sparked an emotional reaction equal to that of Save Pet Society. One example that comes close is, fittingly, from SuperPoke!

Players, however, could download their pets before the game ended. Offline, players could continue to interact with their pets and the itemsthey purchased, but not with each other.EA did not offer Pet Society players this option. Instead, EA offered them incentives to try other EA games, namely Plants vs. Zombies Adventures, whichwas preparing to launch at the same time that Pet Society was winding down.' They EA were saying this would be the game for us to transition to,' Inouye said, 'and of course none of us want play it because it's the polar oppositeof Pet Society.It's not all blood and guts and everything, it's not horribly violent, but it's just not the same.' 'What should have been surrounding Pet Society during its last days is not neon marketing signs,' Earner said. 'It should have been thank you notes to anaudience of millions of people that played that game for years.

Instead, it was just bullshit marketing stuff. That's where they really screwed up.' .Now that that battle is lost and the game is offline, Save Pet Society is focused on convincing EA to issue a Limited Use License.

Such a license willallow another company to operate Pet Society at its own expense and let players back in the game, while still allowing EA to collect a percentage of theprofits.Inouye says that an executive level contact told her that EA has kept all of Pet Society's data. Should EA issue Limited Use License, players couldpresumably reunite with their pets, picking up exactly where they left off.Inouye is a leukemia cancer survivor who blogs about the chronic pains caused by her condition at. As she rightly points out, by distracting players. 'Playing the game became an escape for me and a lot of people from the more unpleasant aspects of life,' Inouye said. 'It was just a really special placeto go. I can think of at least three other people off the top of my head, who are living with chronic illness like me who I met through the game.' 'I suspect that what's really going on is that this became a powerful way for people to communicate with one another,' Earner said, 'perhaps people whoaren't comfortable doing it live, or just found the elements of that cute little pet instead of a blank chat more compelling.

I think that what they missis not their pets. I think they miss that community, that channel of getting to people that they love, and they're not going to get that back.' It's easy to dismiss Save Pet Society as yet another fringe group on the great and silly internet.

But consider how much of who we think we are isperformed in digital arenas controlled exclusively by companies who answer only to a fluctuating sea of faceless shareholders. How many hours have youspent with your World of Warcraft character? How long did your kid spend building castles in Minecraft, and what do they mean to him? How many people knowyou only by your avatar and screen name?

Who owns the means that bind you to them and what do they owe you? 'Increasingly our world doesn't draw a line between the virtual and the real,' Earner said. 'That was a bright line 10 years ago, but increasingly virtualthings have as much value to us as real things because at the end of the day it's about our experiences and memories.

Those are the things that we holddearly.' This game is an example of what's going to be an increasing problem. If you're going to make an always-on, persistent service that people spend thousandsof hours and also thousands of dollars in, what do you do with these games when they run their course? I think that what this story teaches us is that wedon't have a good answer.'

The reason why I made Facebook is back?