"I don't know if this is going to sound hokey," she said about her attachment to the game, "but your pet was always laughing, smiling, having a good time. The atmosphere was always very positive and uplifting, focused on being happy, and you know, In life...life is definitely not like that all the time."

Save Pet Society's Twitter profile picture is a caricature of sadness. A green, cartoon cat with big, round eyes sheds bulbous tears. Its eyebrows are raised in a pleading facial expression and its cute little paws hold up a sign inscribed with what is either a request or a call to action: "#savepetsociety."

Inouye's Pet Society pet was a pink cat. She named her Miss Hiss, after a real stray kitten she found in her backyard and later adopted. Inouye thinks the comparison between the loss of a virtual pet to the loss of a real pet is "really fair."

"I know that some people must think, wow, you people need to get a life, you're crazy, but one of EA's business partners is Disney, and people are crazy about Disney animated characters," Inouye said. "People were crazy about Pet Society too. EA has completely underestimated that, and yeah, a lot of people felt like EA was killing their pets. They gave us two months, to cope with the loss, I guess."

When I asked Inouye if she spent any money on Pet Society she laughed, a little embarrassed. "I spent...way too much money. I probably spent... probably $200."

In the social games industry Inouye is what's called a "whale," a term borrowed from the casino industry to describe big spenders.

There are a lot of other similarities to be drawn between social games and the gambling industry. Both business models often extract money from players in tiny increments and rely on audio-visual feedback to send people into the Machine Zone. In fact, a great number of social games are modeled directly after card games and slot machines.

"I'm not so offended," Inouye said after I told her about the whale designation, "but then again it makes me wonder too, if people are spending that much money on a 'free-to-play' game, how come EA couldn't keep it running?"

* * *

Pet Society was originally developed and operated by small startup Playfish. In November 2009, EA acquired Playfish for $300 million as part of its aggressive push into the then burgeoning social gaming space.

John Earner was Product Manager at Playfish at the time. He said that the game's success caught the team by surprise. "It just kept growing and growing. I remember in the early days when it made a $1000 a day we got excited. And then it made $5000, and $10,000. It went from 200,000 players to a million, which was amazing, and then it hit six million and it was the biggest game on Facebook. It was the most exciting career ride I've ever been on."

At its peak Pet Society had 50 million monthly players, 5 million daily players and made as much as $100,000 a day by selling in-game items--clothing for the pets or decorations for their houses. These were very good numbers at the time, especially for a small team of 18 people. But in the following three years Playfish exploded. Its U.K. studio alone, its central hub and the location that operated Pet Society, grew to 160 people, with almost as many marketing people as developers, and other, smaller satellite studios elsewhere in the world.