Playfish is a developer of free to play casual social gaming that can be played on social networking platforms
Playfish logo
such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and iPhone, among others. The company is headquartered in London, England, and has offices in Beijing, China; San Francisco, United States; and Tromso, Norway. Playfish games are continually enhanced with new features and challenges. Games are usually initially released on Facebook before making their way onto other platforms.
Pet Society is Playfish's most popular game and has more than 1,000,000 fans on its Facebook page, and it's one of the fastest growing third party applications on Facebook.
History
Playfish was founded in 2007 by Kristian Segerstrale, Sebastien de Halleux, Sami Lababidi, and Shukri Shammas. In October 2008, they secured $17 million USD in venture capital funding from Accel Partners and Index Ventures.
Who has the Biggest Brain? was the company's first hit released on December 18th, 2007 . It was one of the first Facebook games to attract millions of daily players, and allowed the company to raise funding necessary to produce other hits, but has retired on September 30th, 2011 along with Hotel City, My Empire, Word Challenge, Bowling Buddies and, Geo Challenge. Then they were purchased by EA (Electronic Arts) in 2009 for $400 million.
It has retired some famous games such as Restaurant City, and Country Story. Monopoly Millionares (released on January 31st, 2011) will be shut down on August 17th, 2012. EA says, "The decision to retire older games is never easy, as the development teams and operational staff pour their hearts into these games almost as much as the customers playing them.'
"But in order to focus our efforts in developing new and exicting titles, as well as bringing new content and updates to our existing popular games, the time has come to retire these games," said EA.
"We'd like to thank all our loyal players who have continued to play these games."
Restaurant City has retired on June 29th, 2012, and is the lastest game to retire so far.
List Of Games
The company has created 24 games:
Current Games
- The Sim's Social - (released on August 9th, 2011)
- Sim City Social - (released on June 25th, 2012)
- Outernauts - (released on July 26th, 2012)
Pet Society - virtual pet game (released on August 28th, 2008) - World Series Superstars - (released on March 30th, 2011)
- Madden NFL Superstars - (released on August 31st, 2010)
- EA Sports FIFA Superstars - (released on June 10th, 2010)
- NHL Superstars - (released on October 5th, 2011)
- RISK: Factions - (released on January 11th, 2012)
Retired Games
- Who Has The Biggest Brain? - game show themed skill based challenge (released on December 18th, 2007 and retired on September 30th, 2011)
Word Challenge - word construction from scrambled letters (released on May 1st, 2008 and retired on September 30th, 2011)
Geo Challenge - time based geographic location challenge (released on September 22nd, 2008 and retired on September 30th, 2011)
Bowling Buddies - 3D bowling with intuitive controls (released on May 8th, 2008 and retired on September 30th, 2011)
Minigolf Party- 3D golfing game (released on January 27th, 2009 and retired on January 27th, 2010)
Restaurant City - resource management game (released on April 28th, 2009 and retired on June 29th, 2012)
Crazy Planets- Strategy game to destroy robots (released on July 1st, 2009) It's currently on hiatus.
Country Story- farming game (released on July 29th, 2009 and retired on December 1st, 2011)
Quiztastic! - quizzes made by users (released on August 14th, 2009 and retired on March 4th, 2010) - Hotel City- released March 26th, 2010 and retired on September 30th, 2011
- Monopoly Millionares - (released January 31st, 2011 and will retire on August 17th, 2012)
- My Empire - (released on June 1st, 2010 and retired on September 30th, 2011)
- Gangster City - (released on January 26th, 2010 and retired on June 7th, 2011)
- Pirates Ahoy - (released on August 10th, 2010 and retired on June 7th, 2011)
- Poker Rivals - (released on December 7th, 2009 and retired on June 7th, 2011)
- A vacation version of Pet Society was called Pet Society Vacation (released on July 18th, 2011 and retired on December 26th, 2011)
External links
Text taken from Wikipedia.