EA closing Playfish's SimCity Social, The Sims Social, Pet Society

Three of Playfish's Facebook games — SimCity Social, The Sims Social and Pet Society — are being closed June 14, publisher Electronic Arts announced today, citing a drop-off in the player base and activity for each game.

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

Pet Society is the oldest of the three, having launched in August 2008. The Sims Social was released in August 2011, and SimCity Social launched in open beta in late June 2012 after having been announced at E3 that year. Playfish developed Pet Society, while The Sims Social and SimCity Social were co-developed with Maxis.

As Joystiq notes, these were the last three extant Playfish titles; every other game listed on its website has either been shut down already or is scheduled to be closed. The lone exception is Madden NFL Social, an iOS and Facebook title that was developed at EA Tiburon, the studio that makes the traditional Madden console games.

EA said it plans to continue to develop and release Facebook games, "most notably games from PopCap" such as Bejeweled Blitz, Solitaire Blitz and Plants vs. Zombies Adventures. The company added that it will be giving players of the aforementioned Playfish titles a "special offer" to transition them to a PopCap Facebook game.

The news follows last week's layoffs at EA, which were reportedly centered around the company's Montreal-based mobile studio. EA suffered another round of layoffs in February, with those cuts limited to company's Los Angeles studio and the Montreal arm of Visceral Games.

We've reached out to EA for more details on Playfish.

Update: When asked about Playfish, an EA representative declined comment and pointed us to the EA blog post linked above.