Playdom to close down three games: Fanglies, Big City Life, and Treetopia

Players who log into Fanglies right now will see a sad message telling them of the game's demise. Playdom's title released just three months ago in early July, was a fun Sims-esque style virtual world pet management game that we gave a rather glowing review for. It comes as a surprise to us that Playdom will be closing the game down for good on October 31, 2010. Fanglies currently has around 780,000 monthly active players and peaked around 1.2 million players.

While looking into this, we also discovered that Playdom's Treetopia was already closed down at the end of September, and Big City Life has the exact same message as Fanglies stating that it too will be closing down on November 18th. Another Playdom game with similar stats (and perhaps at risk) is Verdonia, although right now it still seems to be safe. We believe this is the first time that Playdom has completely closed a game for business, and it comes in an attempt to "focus on building new more engaging games."

Both Fanglies and Treetopia were games that were completely new in concept from anything else on Facebook. If players want something new other than farming, why aren't they paying for it? Is it true that maybe innovation in Facebook games isn't what the player base is looking for right now? If anything, these games suffered because it looked so good but didn't have the fun and engaging gameplay that successful games need to grow and stay viable in this crowded market. Even large developers like Playdom and Zynga are susceptible to swinging and missing, and it appears that Playdom wanted to put Fanglies, Treetopia, and Big City Life to the chopping block before wasting more resources on unsuccessful games.

There are over a million players currently playing these games, and it's hard to stay loyal to a company that is shutting down games that you have paid money for. Playdom have now slipped down to the 5th largest Facebook application developer, and will slip even further once these apps are no longer factored in. They still have very large titles in their arsenal, though, such as City of Wonder, Social City, and Market Street.