EA 'retires' SimCity Social, Sims Social, and more from Facebook

The Sims Social was once heralded as Electronic Arts' "most successful Facebook game," but now it's being laid to rest along with SimCity Social and Pet Society. These three social games will be extinct from Facebook as of June 14.

The game maker made the announcement today, saying that it was a hard decision but had to be done in order to "reallocate servers and resources to more popular titles," according to the FAQ section of its Web site.

"Today we are informing players of the difficult decision to retire some of our Facebook games: The Sims Social, SimCity Social, and Pet Society," EA wrote in a blog post today. "After millions of people initially logged in to play these games, the number of players and amount of activity has fallen off."

EA has experienced a rough last couple of months. The company's CEO, John Riccitiello, resigned from his position in March, admitting that some of the company's financial shortcomings were his fault. Then, last week, EA confirmed it was downsizing some of its developer teams and laying off an undisclosed number of employees. And, adding insult to injury earlier this month, the Consumerist's Worst Company awards voted EA as the "worst company in America" for the second year in a row.

As far as what will become of The Sims Social, SimCity Social, and Pet Society, EA told players who still have balances of in-game currency to try to spend it before the games shut down in June. The game maker is also giving players a special offer on a PopCap game. It's unclear what the offer is, but EA said more details are forthcoming.

EA acquired PopCap Games in 2011, bringing in popular titles like Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled, and Zuma. While these games have been doing better than many of EA's social games, PopCap has had to downsize too. Last August, in re-evaluating its costs, the company laid off 50 employees at its headquarters.