The Sims Social, SimCity Social, Pet Society all to go kaput June 14

EA, the company that just said goodbye to its CEO of six years and actually won The Consumerist's Golden Poo Award as The Worst Company in America for a second consecutive year, just made a baffling move. Electronic Arts has announced that three of its most popular Facebook games--The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society--will go offline on June 14. Why?

"After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off," the company wrote on its corporate blog. "For people who have seen other recent shutdowns of social games, perhaps this is not surprising."

That's a refreshingly frank explanation, to say the least. However, The Sims Social and Pet Society are the publisher's second and third most widely played games, according to AppData. Granted, nearly all of EA's social games have experienced drop-off, but a game with over 1 million (or even over 500,000) daily players--given the smaller teams required to keep these kinds of games afloat--are still profitable, no? Maybe not.

Rather, EA has shifted its social focus almost exclusively to PopCap's successful Facebook and mobile games, like Bejeweled Blitz, Solitaire Blitz and the upcoming Plants Vs. Zombies Adventures. In fact, EA will offer affected players care packages to ease them into PopCap's corner of Facebook. But more importantly, with all of its games on the chopping block, where does this leave Playfish?

EA has declined to comment: "We're not commenting today on specific teams".

Are you bummed to see these Facebook games bite the dust? Will you move on over to PopCap's games? Add Comment.