Cityville shutting down

Zynga Inc (NASDAQ:ZNGA) is shutting down CityVille, the franchise that once ruled the online social gaming platform with more than 100 million active players, says a report from SFGATE.

Although the company has not made a public announcement yet, players heard about the shutdown date of April 30 after logging into the city building simulation game, where they were welcomed with the above “Dear Citizens” message.

“If you currently have coins or cash in your CityVille account, you can use them to access the game’s current content until April 30, 2015,” read the message.

During the fourth-quarter earnings call, chief financial officer David Lee said that the company has decided to bring down ten of its Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) games. Additionally, Zynga is shuttering its Beijing studio for running CityVille.

The titles was launched in December 2010, when Zynga was becoming popular as a Facebook social games powerhouse. Just 50 days after the initial launch, the title had 61 million monthly active users, outperforming FarmVille to become the company’s most popular social game.

Zynga, which went public in 2011, was popular for titles like CityVille and FarmVille, as well as for Zynga Poker. However, players soon started abandoning the platform. Zynga tried to revive the spark by launching a re-designed version CityVille 2, but it was noy much of a success. The game maker also launched other games such as FarmVille 2 or CastleVille Legends, but failed to garner many new users. In December, the game maker reported that it has 108 million monthly active players across its platform.