Diner Dash serves its last dish on Facebook Aug. 29 due to poor traffic

It's always sad to see a Facebook game go, but it's even sadder when it is attached to a beloved (and lucrative) franchise. Diner Dash has found success on handhelds like the Nintendo DS, PCs and even the Xbox 360, but not on Facebook. PlayFirst, the game's developer, has announced that it will shut Diner Dash down on Aug. 29, because the game "is no longer performing at a level that can be supported," according to a statement posted on the PlayFirst blog.

The game, which launched just in January of this year, reached an all-time high of 2.5 million monthly players, though players have fallen off considerably, leaving it at just over 1.2 million monthly players right now, according to AppData. What's worse is only a small fraction of those--just over 90 thousand--are playing daily. In other words, it's simply not worth it to keep the game running for PlayFirst, which strikes us as a mixture of odd and heartbreaking.

We enjoyed the game when it first released, though we had our doubts of whether the game could rise to the challenge giants like CityVille have presented to Facebook game latecomers. Unfortunately, like many before it, Diner Dash couldn't hang. However, PlayFirst is offering the PC and Mac OS versions of its hit time-management game--a genre I thought would do extremely well on Facebook considering--for half off the original price until Sept. 1 for those who use the promo code "dinerdash50." You lose a game, you get one for 50 percent off ... at least we didn't come away with nothing.

[Via Inside Social Games]

Were you a fan of Diner Dash on Facebook? Why do you think the game did so poorly on Facebook? Will you continue to play the games elsewhere?

NBA Legend creator Lionside bought out by Ngmoco [Updated]

Update: An ngmoco spokesperson confirmed the news to ISG: "We can confirm that ngmoco has acquired the Lionside team. The terms of the agreement are undisclosed. We are very excited to have Lionside join the ngmoco and DeNA family. They are working on new products for the Mobage social gaming platform, bringing their passion and experience to our continuously expanding first party development capabilities."

Neither side seems to want anyone to know about it just yet, but signs are pointing toward a buyout in the works between ngmoco and Lionside. Inside Social Games reports that, according to numerous Lionside employee Linkedin pages, a shuttered website, an inactive Twitter account and Facebook games that simply aren't operational, ngmoco may have acquired the San Francisco-based company.

A tipster pointed ISG toward the Linkedin pages of Lionside VP of Business Operations Michael McBride and European Account Manager Kane Curran, both of which read that Lionside has been acquired by ngmoco. Not to mention that Lionside CEO Brandon Barber's Google+ profile reads, "Lionside & ngmoco marketing and product guy."

To add to the mountain of evidence that Lionside has potentially been acquired by ngmoco, the company's official website has been taken down. And neither NBA Legend nor Lionside Football are available to play, the former of which is "being enhanced," according to a page that has replaced the actual game on Facebook.

Unfortunately, both games have been performing poorly, garnering a mere total of just over 367,000 monthly players, according to AppData. So, this begs the question: If Lionside has been acquired by ngmoco, just what would the studio be up to in its new capacity? Ngmoco, since it was purchased by Japanese social gaming giant DeNA earlier this year, has been working diligently on a global version of the publisher's Mobage mobile social games network, which was just released for Android.

So, our best guess is that Lionside would be working on mobile social games to be played on the Mobage network, though it doesn't seem that Lionside has ever worked in mobile games as a company (official information from the company is unavailable at the moment). We've contacted Lionside for comment.

Are you convinced that ngmoco has purchased Lionside? What do you think or hope the studio will do for ngmoco and DeNA as a result? Sound off in the comments. 1 Comment