In its death throes, Adobe Flash kills Zynga’s original FarmVille

Adobe is shutting down its Flash software today, and with it will Zynga’s original 2009 FarmVille game.

This ends an era of social games that will be remembered in history with mixed emotions. Some people hated the spam nature of FarmVille and its tedious gameplay, while others appreciated what he tried to do to make games more social and attractive to untapped demographic groups, like older women.

As of today, Flash will no longer be supported by browsers and Facebook, as it has been overtaken by web technologies like HTML5. And that means that Flash-based FarmVille will no longer work. Instead of adapting the original game to run in HTML5, Zynga chose to end the social game. Those who are still playing can migrate to FarmVille: Tropic Escape or play in the browser, like FarmVille2: Tropic Escape, FarmVille 2: Country Escape and FarmVille 2.

Zynga stopped accepting in-game payments in November and offered a bonus package for those who migrate to FarmVille: Tropic Escape.

Mark Pincus, co-founder and former CEO of Zynga, recalled the 11-year game in a series of tweets.

Tomorrow, Zynga closes FarmVille on Facebook after 11 years. I wanted to share the story of how we created it and why it played such an important role in the evolution of the games. 1 / x

– mark pincus (@markpinc) December 31, 2020

“FarmVille has demonstrated that a game can be a live and always-on service that can offer daily surprise and delight, similar to a favorite TV series,” wrote Pincus. “Games can also connect groups of people and bring them together. FarmVille has started a new category of ‘invest and express’ games, where players can invest time and express themselves with friends and family. Busy adults, especially women, have realized that games can have a valuable place in their lives and offer you more than empty calories. “

How FarmVille came about

Before FarmVille, Zynga’s most successful game was Zynga Poker. In May 2009, Zynga acquired MyMiniLife and organized its four engineers – Amitt Mahajan, Joel Poloney, Luke Rajlich and Sizhao Zao Yang – to make a social farm game. Other titles like Farm Town, MyFarm and Happy Farm were successful on social platforms, so Zynga was late for the farm’s social party. And for a long time it would be criticized for cloning other games and making them more successful than the originals.

The MyMiniLife team moved quickly, under the direction of Mark Skaggs and David Gray. The team sat in an alcove near Pincus’s office. He met with them daily. In six weeks, they released the original game on June 19 at 8pm. The Facebook game was a spam title, filling its news feed with the achievements of its farm. He notified you when your crops were ready and you harvested them simply by clicking on them with your mouse. But it was easy to play for people who didn’t have much time. With simple clicks of the mouse, you can plow, plant and harvest. The problem was, you had to go back or your crops would wither. Thus, the players got stuck in an addictive cycle.

“In the past few weeks, I have received players from all over the world to share their stories and thank me for the game,” said Skaggs in a message to GamesBeat. “It is humiliating and moving to see how much the game has touched people and has become part of their lives. When I started making games in 1993, I had no idea that I would be part of something this big, or play around the world, like FarmVille did. We did it at a special time, 2009, right after the recession and early summer, at a time when Facebook was really growing, how Zynga was able to support it, how the Amazon cloud was mature enough, as women and casual players around the world were ready for something new. “

It was an immediate viral hit and reached one million active users a day in the first week.

“The moment when we realized what we had right after the launch was a highlight of my life and career,” said Mahajan in a message to GamesBeat. “We really got a lightning bolt from a bottle.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, asked Pincus to send as much content as he could, as Facebook had just opened the news feed to application developers.

“FarmVille became the first major game to leverage the news feed as an extension of the main game,” said Pincus.

At one point, in 2013, FarmVille had 17 players in the Vatican. Zynga won all other farm games – at least until Supercell’s Hay Day in 2012 – because his game was much simpler to play and much easier to share with friends. It was an accessibility lesson.

In a message to GamesBeat, former Zynga Yang engineer said MyMiniLife’s intellectual property was in its game engine, which could exploit the cloud. This made it easier to increase computing resources as the game’s user base skyrocketed. The MyMiniLife engine has now become a staple of Zynga’s new games.

The game grew to more than 83 million players in 2010. This allowed Zynga to keep the game (apparently) forever, and Zynga’s mission was to produce “eternal franchises”. He had an advantage over others because he could promote his new games in the news feeds of FarmVille players, at least until Facebook decided to restrict this practice.

“A special team of individuals came together to do this,” said Skaggs. “I’m smiling as I think about it all. I am grateful to all the players and because the game was part of an incredible part of the game’s history. “

This helped propel Zynga to the top of the pile on Facebook games and eventually allowed Zynga to go public with a $ 9 billion valuation in 2011.

“FarmVille has become a training ground for a generation of entrepreneurs and product managers,” said Pincus.

In a way, the end of FarmVille is a lesson for players. Proponents of blockchain – the safe and transparent decentralized ledger – say it can be used to establish ownership of digital items. If game companies create blockchain-based games, players can actually own the items they buy. If a game ends, the player can take these digital items and use them in another game, if possible, thanks to the blockchain check. Only now are some of these games being created, where users can actually own what they buy.

One of these games was recently created by a team led by Eric Schiermeyer, co-founder of Zynga.