Pet Society

Pet Society is an internet social game developed by Playfish. Pet Society was released in beta at August 4, 2008. The game which is launched firstly in Facebook (Now can be played on MySpace and Bebo but are only fewer features than the Facebook) has been ranked as the most popular Facebook application (for about 19 million monthly active users). Players can choose a pet, choose the gender, the name, the color, the features (ears, nose, mouth etc.), and even visit friends and bring gifts for them. The pet has to be fed, washed and made happy by visiting friends, caressing him and playing with him. The more you play, the more your experience points grow and so more items become available for your pet and your house gains more and more rooms. Of course, you can decorate your rooms with the things you buy in shops. The game's genre is digital pet, fantasy which a few of its features is related like Tamagotchi.

Features

Pet Society tries to maintain its popularity by launching new purchasable items to each of the stores every week, and attracts new users through its long continued efforts to stay updated, bringing new features such as recycling , stickers and the Pet Society Photo Album feature. The newest feature was the first update on February 2010, which introduced petlings. During Easter, Halloween and Christmas, their are usually holiday special items and is twice longer than This Weeks Specials (short for TWS). Currently, Pet Society contains the following stores and places in its large neighbourhood:

Luxury Store – This store mainly sells expensive products to the richer pets, and contains beds, jacuzzis, and such.
Hurdle Racing Stadium – Here pets can engage in Hurdling races of three, and also has the “betting” mode where players bet on the pet they think will win. If players guess correctly they will get double their money from how many they have gave on the bet
Food Store – Here pets can find typical fruits, vegetables, meat products, drinks, etc.

The Food Shop has weekly features which sometimes reflect to the calendar.

Furniture Store – This shop supplies various tables, chairs, couches, beds and several types of shelves and cabinets.
Gadget Shop(Former after updates) – Sells electronic and cool items, such as TVs, radios, telephones, clocks, laptops and such weird devices your pet will use.
Mystery Shop – The Mystery Shop sells Fairy and Toy “Mystery” Eggs and Mystery boxes which contains common, uncommon and rare items that some are not purchasable in Pet Society.

Mystery boxes come in three sizes, vary in price, and the items will be different along with the price.
The Mystery Shop sometimes have released odd temporaily objects to your own pet called magic foods

Cafe – A more uncommon recent feature, the Cafe is a social bonding service where you can visit random players’ houses everyday, meeting their pets.

You can also buy typical coffee-shop food and tea sets here.

D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) – This place is where you can shop for wallpapers, floors, doors and windows.
Clothes Store – Here you can buy clothes, shoes and accessories for your pet to wear.
Stylist – You can change your pet's gender, name, colour and features.
Bank (Not a shop now) – Allows you to buy more coins here using Paypal to spend in the other shops.
Cash Shop – This is the newest shop, and you can buy special Playfish Cash, then spend it on special items found only here. You may need real cash to get Playfish Cash.
Pond – The latest place in the Pet Society neighbourhood, you can use foods as baits to capture fishes with your fishing rod.
Garden The latest addition to the stores in the game, you can buy plants and different seeds for your pet’s garden here.

The vegetable seeds yield vegetables that grow in size as time passes, but these can rot if not watched carefully.
Other garden objects use for decoration and helps your garden (only the fairies do that).

History of Pet Society

The history of Pet Society after it was released in beta, the game only had little changes. It was actually incompleted, and this is what Playfish said when it was their 1st anniversary :

"It's been an eventful year for sure. Compare the Pet Society when it first started to where we are now - hard to believe that once upon a time there was no stadium, no garden, no Mystery Boxes... at one point there weren't even any beds for our pets to sleep in!

And yet we're only just getting started. Imagine where we'll be in another year's time! No doubt reminiscing when the fishing pond and aquariums were first introduced all those months ago!

To make sure everyone's in the party spirit before we enjoy our birthday celebrations we've put all kinds of party items in the shops. There's even glow in the dark items which shine when you turn the lights out! So come join us as we celebrate our first year of Pet Society and look forward to all the amazing things we've got planned for the year to come!"

No one knows much of the history of Pet Society during 2008, the oldest post was posted at May 25, 2009 about the Chinese Dragon Boat Day, featuring a chinese dragon bench picture on Pet Society.

Reception

On May 28 2012, the game received 4.3 out of 5 stars based on 40,017 reviews, although it was just reviewed by average Facebook users. If you go to the reviews of the official Pet Society fan page, you can see that most of the reviews made by the people were not professional and usually gave them either 5 stars or 1. Some users even used reviewing to advertise their site or to "add me". The game has 9,002,577 monthly active users. Rating the game is still available on Facebook. Other than the Facebook reviewers, there are no other outside reviewers yet.

"Pet Society is a great social game because it allows you to express yourself by choosing how your pet and his home looks like and offers plenty of choices every week. It also is fun and addicting because it has many promos and offers free money and items from time to time. But if you don't have any friends to play it with, the game can become boring and can lose its appeal."