EA PopCap has decided to shut down ZipZapPlay’s Baking Life on Facebook, according to Inside Social Games. The game once had 6.7 million monthly active users, but that number dropped to 2.2 million when EA acquired PopCap, and currently sits at 760,000 according to App Data.
“Unfortunately, we had to make a very difficult decision to shut down the game. The Baking Life player numbers have dropped in such a way that Baking Life is no longer performing well enough to justify continued support. As such, we are reallocating resources to games that we are developing for future release,” said PopCap VP Garth Chouteau.
The real problem comes with the fact that everything related to the title is being deleted. User profiles and the in-game items attached to them are just gone. PopCap is warning all customers to spend all remaining virtual currency before the shutdown date of January 31, 2012. The loss highlights part of the issue with online titles: once the server is shutdown, users are left with nothing to show for it.
