Playfirst Sunsets Diner Dash as Traffic Declines

PlayFirst sent out notice to players today that the Facebook version of its popular restaurant simulation game Diner Dash will shut down on August 29. The developer cited declining performance as the reason for the closure, which as the same reason PlayFirst sunsetted Chocolatier in April.

Diner Dash’s life cycle plays out much like PlayFirst’s other Facebook titles as charted by our traffic tracking service, AppData. The game came to Facebook in January of this year, climbing to 2.2 million monthly active users and over 174,000 daily active users in its first two months on the platform. The game continued to grow in MAU through the month of May, but DAU began a steady decline in April. Diner Dash hit all-time highs of 2.5 million MAU and 257,000 DAU before arriving at today’s levels of 1.2 million MAU and 90,000 DAU.

The game is a faithful adaptation of the original PC download title where players control a waitress responsible for seating customers, taking orders, serving food, and cleaning up messes. A customizable garden was added to the Facebook version to maximize energy mechanics common to games on the platform, as well some gameplay boosts available for purchase with Frictionless Credits. Cross-promotion and connectivity with the other versions of Diner Dash on iOS, PC and Mac were limited to nonexistent, though Facebook players are receiving a coupon code for 50% off on the PC/Mac version.

In the restaurant genre on Facebook, Diner Dash stood out as both a latecomer and an oddity. While many early restaurant sim games like Restaurant City and Cafe World could be likened to Diner Dash’s core gameplay around pleasing customers, neither game placed emphasis on click timing the way Diner Dash has always done. It could be that the early restaurant sim games on Facebook altered player expectations such that the real Diner Dash experience was a bit jarring for players. It could also be that PlayFirst simply lacked enough of a Facebook presence to sustain a social game for an extended period of time being that its previous two games, Wedding Dash and Chocolatier, never came close to the traffic peaks Diner Dash enjoyed.

PlayFirst representatives did not respond to request for comment at time of press. When we last spoke with the developer about long term growth plans for the title, we were told that PlayFirst was experimenting with monetization and player progression through the various restaurant venues. As of today, players can earn more than just one restaurant and the world map has been altered to better reflect player progression toward unlocking new restaurants.

UPDATE: Mari Baker, CEO and president of PlayFirst, says, “We view this as a strategic redistribution of resources to platforms where we see better growth potential and those are the mobile platforms, specifically iOS.”

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DNA Games Sunsets Casino City, Bar World and Slot City on Facebook Following Zynga Acquisition

Late yesterday, DNA Games posted announcements on the Pages of Casino City, Bar World and Slot City announcing each game’s impending closure set for July 8. The developer was acquired by Zynga last month to the purpose of developing new intellectual property.

Typically, we see social games on Facebook sunsetting only after a prolonged period of decline across monthly active users and monthly active users. These games usually hit their peak traffic within three to four months of launch and then spend as many as 12 months shrinking before the developer moves to sunset or change its growth strategy. According to research published in Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011, engaged social gamers stick around for about two months before moving on. This tells us that decline slopes are impacted as much by new users not coming in as by old users lapsing.

In the case of DNA Games’ library, we see some inconsistencies with other sunset scenarios with its two newer games, Bar World and Slot City. The former launched in November 2010 and reached peak traffic only one month after launch and instead of steadily decline, it experienced a resurgence in traffic almost four months later. The latter, meanwhile, only just launched in early April, barely giving it three months in which to aim for peak numbers. Both games saw a marked decline in May just prior to the acquisition announcement.

Casino City, meanwhile, tells a slightly different story. This game is DNA Games’ oldest Facebook title, launched in April 2010, and by far its largest, accounting for over half the developer’s total MAU and DAU across all its games. Casino City differs from what we think of as a typical sunset pattern in that didn’t reach peak traffic until February of this year. While the beginning of this social game’s “slow burn” life cycle differs from other sunsetting games, however, the end of it looks similar — Casino City began a downward slope at the beginning of March that remained consistent even throughout the acquisition announcement period.

Had DNA Games continued along a sunsetting strategy we’ve seen with Playfish and PlayFirst, we could’ve expected it to migrate Casino City users to Slot City as development efforts shifted over to the new game. The acquisition by Zynga, however, puts the developer in a unique position. On the one hand, DNA could’ve maintained its thriving game while closing its declining games — similar to what ZipZapPlay appears to be doing with Baking Life and Happy Habitat after the developer was acquired by PopCap Games. On the other, DNA can close all its games at once and “start fresh” with new IP for Zynga that in no way relies on player loyalty from its previous games. In either case, Zynga’s overall MAU and DAU dwarfs DNA Games’ many times over, so traffic probably isn’t much of a concern for the developer at this time.

Whatever the motivation behind the closures, we’re interested to see what sunset patterns emerge among older games from established developers. As the Facebook games platform matures through its third year and social games finally reach natural “ends” somewhere between one year and two, it may be that developers begin to build games and content release schedules around a finite life cycle. What that life cycle might be probably depends on game genre and resources available for user acquisition.

DNA Games deferring to Zynga for comment on this story. Zynga would only say for the record that it continues to work with its existing studios on new IP. Zynga’s latest social game, Empires & Allies, launched June 1.

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PlayFirst Sunsets Chocolatier as Diner Dash Ramps Up Monetization, Social Features

Casual games developer PlayFirst has a successful background on PC and iOS downloads, but so far the company has only introduced three of its franchises on Facebook. Of those, only Diner Dash seems to be thriving — thanks to a $9.2 million round of funding, a loyal fan base, and tight integration with Facebook Credits.

Diner Dash launched on Facebook early this year and saw strong growth throughout the month of February. Since that time, the developer has been steadily adding new features to the title, including additional playable restaurants and purchasing options via premium decorations and gameplay boosts. It also recently added Frictionless Credits as a payment option for boosts and is planning to integrate Buy With Friends in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, PlayFirst is sunsetting its second Facebook title, Chocolatier: Sweet Society, before the end of the month. In a farewell message posted on its blog, the company explained that the title was no longer performing at a level that justified the expense of maintaining it. Sweet Society players are being offered a special discount on the PC version of the game for a limited time. PlayFirst’s oldest Facebook foray, Wedding Dash Bash, went offline in September 2010, roughly six months after its launch.

We spoke with Eric Hartness, vice president and general manager of social games at PlayFirst, about some of the lessons the team is learning to make Diner Dash a sustainable Facebook game. Though it would’ve been easy to port the original PC retail game to Facebook, PlayFirst approached the platform instead with a new game in the series, complete with its own storyline and character cast.

“That was one of the key challenges, adapting the gameplay from a disc to a live game on Facebook,” Hartness says. “Our core audience is older women, so it works out really well with all the older women on Facebook. [The Facebook audience] is a bit different. We’ve got about 20 percent male, when historically we’ve been 90 percent female. We’re seeing a younger demographic as well and international players. So Facebook has really allowed us to broaden our audience.”

Diner Dash currently has 2.3 million monthly active users and 196,000 daily active users on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers. It already surpasses Chocolatier’s peak traffic of 902,000 MAU and 119,000 DAU, which the game reached in October 2010, five months after its initial launch. Wedding Dash Bash boasts far less than that at all-time highs of 164,000 MAU and 15,000 DAU. Hartness points out that Diner Dash achieved these results not through ad buys or extensive cross promotion within its iOS title, but through sheer brand recognition with existing fans.

“Recently we’ve been testing with some ad spend, but predominantly most of our installs have occurred without it,” he says. “This is something that I’m very proud of. It showcases how much the fans love Diner Dash. We have over 58,000 reviews and we’re holding steady at 5 stars, a claim most of our competitors can’t make.”

In the long run, PlayFirst hopes to sustain Diner Dash’s growth through additional monetization features and steady content support. As detailed in our early look, the game is structured around the traditional restaurant time management gameplay and a park decoration meta-game where players can spend the currency they earn from working shifts at the restaurant. PlayFirst has adjusted the traditional gameplay so that players can only play two restaurants for free and must spend Facebook Credits to unlock premium restaurants. Recently, the developer downgraded a premium restaurant to an unlockable restaurant that players can earn by increasing their star rank.

Hartness says the company is thinking of different ways to do these downgrades. “We might use [materials gifted by friends] or an ‘invite friends to unlock’ [mechanic], or some different combinations to work that out,” he tells us.

For now, the social features in the game are limited to gifting energy or items used for decorating restaurants, visiting friends’ parks to help out with daily missions, and some light leaderboard integration. Hartness says that the leaderboards will be “beefing up” in the near future with weekly tournaments, score-tracking, and the ability to challenge friends.

On the horizon is the possibility of integration with the larger Diner Dash brand. PlayFirst has a large enough fan base to where cross-promotion could be especially helpful to the Facebook version. Hartness is no stranger to the ideal of cross-platform cross-promotion, having spent nearly nine years at EA before entering the social games space.

“We have talked about it but we haven’t gotten to that stage yet,” Hartness says . “Chris Williams who heads up the iPhone team and I have talked about it, about how can we link Diner Dash on iPhone and Diner Dash on Facebook. It’s very cool conceptually, but very difficult technically. How can we carve out the time?”

Chocolatier: Sweet Society closes officially on April 28. You can follow Diner Dash’s progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

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