Is Pet Society Discontinued? What Happened?

Pet Society was a virtual pet game on Facebook made by Playfish, a London-based game studio. It launched in August 2008, early in the wave of Facebook social games, and quickly became one of the most popular games on the platform.

The game gave each player a small round pet to take care of. You washed it, fed it, and kept it happy. Your pet lived in a house that you could decorate room by room, picking from a large catalog of furniture, rugs, wallpaper, and accessories. New themed items came out regularly, including seasonal collections and limited editions. A lot of players spent significant time and real money putting together particular looks for their pet's home.

The social side of the game was built around visiting friends. You could walk your pet over to a friend's house, see what they had decorated, and earn coins for visiting. Many players went through a list of friends every day as part of their routine. Racing mini-games against other players' pets were also popular and gave you another way to earn in-game currency.

At its peak around 2009 and 2010, Pet Society had about 59 million monthly players and around 5 million who played every day. The game was making roughly $100,000 a day through in-game purchases of premium items. EA acquired Playfish in November 2009 for around $300 million, which brought Pet Society under EA's ownership.

By the early 2010s, Facebook gaming had peaked and player numbers were declining across the whole category. In April 2013, EA announced it would shut down Pet Society along with The Sims Social and SimCity Social, two other Playfish games. The announcement drew a large response from players. Petitions were created asking EA to keep the game running, and some gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. Players had spent years building their pets' homes and had no way to take any of it with them.

The game was originally set to close on June 14, 2013. EA kept it running a few extra days due to the player response and shut it down on June 17. The servers went dark and the game became unplayable.

In 2023 a new game called Pet Paradise launched, made by some of the original Pet Society developers, intended as a spiritual successor. It brought back many of the same ideas including pet care, home decoration, and visiting friends.