Farmville – Yes, the original is finally completing its demise


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Enlarge / They are Too much Excited about doing chores until energy runs out

You might have thought he was already dead, but his developer today Farm Ville, Arguably the first Facebook game to become a true sensation, announced that the game is finally coming to an end.

“11 years after its initial launch in 2009, we are officially announcing the closure of the original Farmville game on Facebook,” Zinga said this morning. Players will be able to continue shopping in the app until November 17; After that point, payments and refunds will be suspended but users will be able to play until December 31, at which time Farmville closes the barn doors for good.

Time is not exactly shrimp’s choice: a decade ago, those people’s games were usually created using Adobe Flash. Flash has been a notoriously complete security disaster for many years, and Adobe said that in 2017 it would finally kill Flash by the end of 2020. That time is upon us now.

Even from its inception, Farm Ville More dedicated video game players joked about its gameplay, its gated, microtransaction-heavy mechanics, and being on Facebook. But jokingly, it changed the game world. Within six months, Farm Ville The report has reached 73 million monthly users, making it a very distant game on Facebook. It makes both Facebook and Zynga a ton of money in the process and builds a model that future games can follow. Ars’s own Kyle Orland also wrote a book about him in 2011.

By 2013, however, shrimp dominance had waned. The company still makes dozens of games, including some licensed products for mobile, Facebook and the web, but Farm Ville, Words with friends, And other popular Facebook gaming titles proved to function mostly as fads. Players often moved on while wearing novelty, and the landscape for low-barrier social and mobile gaming became (and remains) extremely competitive.

So goodbye Farm Ville. That defined era is long overdue, but it has had an impact on gaming.