You can no longer play “Bejeweled Blitz” on Google+. The popular game was pulled from Google+ Games, PopCap confirmed. PopCap, which is owned by Electronic Arts, thanked its players and apologized, reminding users to use up their coins and keep playing – elsewhere.
“PopCap has decided to suspend Bejeweled Blitz on Google+ to redeploy our resources to other adaptations of Bejeweled,” a PopCap spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Certainly, Google is a valuable gaming partner for PopCap and EA, and we’ll continue to develop for Google platforms.”
Before “Blitz” vanished today, users saw this message:
“The Bejeweled team (not the greater PopCap, and certainly not EA) chose to scale back the Google+ offerings because, like most game teams, we want to spend our resources improving games to have the biggest impact on the most customers,” Giordano Contestabile Bejeweled Franchise Director at PopCap, told Inside Social Games. “Shifting some of our resources from Google+ onto higher-impact efforts was a pretty straightforward decision.”
News of the departure of “Bejeweled Blitz” – one of the top 25 most popular games on Facebook – follows a similar move from Wooga, which last month pulled “Monster World” and in July will discontinue “Bubble Island” and “Diamond Dash”, according to Social Games Observer.
“Bejeweled Blitz” has more than 9 million monthly active users, while the three Wooga games combine for more than 33 million monthly users, according to AppData. The games were among the “first wave” of Google+ Games when it launched last August.
Despite the losses, Google+ still offers “Angry Birds” and more than 40 other games.