although most of you probably stopped playing the original FarmVille a long time ago, if you want one last stroke of nostalgia, today is officially the last day you can play on Facebook.
Zynga announced the decision in early September, alerting the seemingly non-zero number of FarmVille fans who still play the original game. It’s a little disconcerting, considering the original FarmVille debuted 11 years ago in 20090, and has since spawned Farmville 2, FarmVille 2: Country Escapeand FarmVille 3. To be fair, FarmVille would probably have continued if it weren’t for the fact that the game runs in Flash and Adobe finally killed Flash this year.
Still, although the popularity of the original game since then it has decreased, There was a time when FarmVille defined the Facebook experience. You would connect and friends whom you haven’t spoken to in years, had left you with an avalanche of notifications and nudgesasking for help on his virtual farm. The sages among us ignored the notifications. The rest of us ended up being sucked into a stupid game of planting virtual tomatoes and carrots, which were harvested and exchanged for … low-quality collectibles and in-game buildings. Some of us may even have spent real money to speed up unbearable waiting times, because who wants to look at a strawberry patch for four hours. Some of us-not this writer, no, no sir–you may have forgotten to set an alarm and logged a little bit too late, just to find said harvest of strawberries had withered and died.
If have you found wondering your existence, wondering why you, a rational individual, would be tempted to spend real money won with difficulty in a trash mobile game, you can thank FarmVille for that. Although FarmVille did not invent game mechanics as real-time loops or withdraw boxesplayed a big role in popularizing them into the mainstream. Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds and all those others Free games with annoying microtransactions in the app, everyone took a page from the FarmVille manual. That said, its success has also changed the gaming landscape, inviting developers to create mobile and browser games that attracted a wider demographics.
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At its peak, FarmVille had 32 million daily active users and a total of 85 million players, according to New York Times. In 2013, it accumulated $ 1 billion in total player purchases. it is death will not leave a huge hole in mobile games; there is, after all, countless fake games that are just like it (as well as several official FarmVille sequences and expansions). It is, however, an important part of the history of modern games, as is the dubious legacy it leaves behind.
Out of curiosity, I tried to enter my old FarmVille farm. I imagined that everything would be withered and dead. I was met with several warnings that FarmVille was about to die and that, to get one last nostalgic ride, I would have to install a Zynga Flash plugin. I did the thing. I was bombarded with various notifications of competitions and game events that I had missed. Everything loaded so slowly. Somehow, my fruit trees didn’t die, despite more than 10 years of abandonment. For reasons that I cannot explain, I planted 10 strawberry beds that I will absolutely not check or harvest before the game dies. I was hit by several other pop-ups. After closing my browser in frustration, I remembered why I stopped this game in the first place.