FarmVille
The Facebook farming game that took over the late-2000s: plow, plant, harvest, repeat — and pester your friends to be your neighbors. At its height tens of millions of people logged in daily to water virtual crops.
FarmVille was developed and published by Zynga and launched on Facebook on June 19, 2009, running as an Adobe Flash application on Facebook and Microsoft's MSN Games. The loop was gentle and endless: plow land, plant and grow and harvest crops, tend trees, and raise livestock — but crops would wither if you didn't return to harvest them in time, so the game quietly trained you to keep coming back. You leaned on neighbors, too, helping and gifting one another, which spread it across friend networks.
It ran on two currencies — Farm Coins you earned by playing and Farm Cash you could buy with real money — making it one of the first major freemium games and a template for how social games would make money. That model paid off spectacularly: at its March 2010 peak FarmVille had 83.76 million monthly active users, daily users peaked at 34.5 million, and it reigned as the most popular game on Facebook until Zynga's own CityVille overtook it at the start of 2011.
The fall was just as steep. By May 2012 it had slipped to seventh among Facebook games, and by April 2016 to 110th. In September 2020 Zynga announced it would shut the original FarmVille down on December 31, 2020, its end tied to the retirement of Adobe Flash Player.
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