It’s not a good sign for a social network when game developers begin to shut down applications all together. And it appears that Zynga is shuttering its Mafia Wars game on beleaguered social network Myspace.
According to a notice on the Mafia Wars homepage within Myspace, Zynga is discontinuing Mafia Wars on Myspace beginning today but is encouraging users to continue playing Mafia Wars at MafiaWars.com. Interestingly, Zynga leads users to its own independent gaming portal as opposed to directing users to the Facebook version of the game.
We’ve reached out to Zynga for comment, but it’s likely that the social gaming giant shut the game down because there simply weren’t enough players to justify keeping the game alive. While the page for the game says it has 13 million active users, this is unlikely considering Mafia Wars on Facebook currently has 16.8 million monthly active users. It’s no secret that Myspace is hemorrhaging users and it really doesn’t make sense for Zynga to put resources into something that has an incredibly low user count.
For those of you who still play Zynga games on Myspace, it appears that Zynga hasn’t shut down all of its titles. Zynga Poker, YoVille, Vampire Wars, Fashion Wars, Special Forces and Pirates are still alive. For now.
