EA Popcap will shut down underperforming social game
Baking Life at the end of the month, attributing the closure to its players numbers not being "enough to justify continued support."
This marks the first confirmed closure of a PopCap game since Electronic Arts
acquired the casual game developer and publisher in July for as much as $1.3 billion ($550 million of that dependent on Popcap meeting certain performance milestones through 2013).
Though the Facebook game's monthly active user count has fallen dramatically in the past 18 months, shrinking from 6.7 million to now 760,000,
Baking Life still has
more users than previous EA social game releases like
Monopoly Millionaires,
Madden NFL Superstars, and Pogo Games.
"Player numbers have dropped in such a way that
Baking Life is no longer performing well enough to justify continued support," Popcap's communications VP
Garth Chouteau explained to Inside Social Games. "As such, we are reallocating resources to games that we are developing for future release."
The game was originally created by Bay Area-based developer ZipZapPlay, which PopCap
purchased for an undisclosed sum last April. Though
Baking Life was the studio's biggest title, its audience numbers were already on a downward slope at the time, having dropped to 2.2 million.
As part of its acquisition deal with PopCap, ZipZapPlay closed another social game last year,
Happy Habitat, to focus on another project. The two companies were reportedly
still deciding whether to close Baking Life during negotiations.
PopCap currently has two titles on Facebook,
Bejeweled Blitz (9.4 million monthly players) and
Zuma Blitz (2.1 million monthly players). It began open beta testing an original game called
Pig Up in July, but as of press time the game is not functioning. It's also working on
Lucky Gem Casino.
