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

Adobe is discontinuing its Flash software today, and with it will go Zynga’s original FarmVille game from 2009.

It ends an era of social games that will be remembered throughout history with mixed emotions. Some people hated the spammy nature of FarmVille and its boring gameplay, while others appreciated what it was trying to do to make games more social and appealing to untapped demographics such as older women.

After today, Flash will no longer be supported by browsers and Facebook, as it has been overtaken by web technologies such as HTML5. And that means Flash based FarmVille will no longer work. Rather than adapting the original game to run on HTML5, Zynga chose to shut down the social game. Those still playing can migrate to FarmVille: Tropic Escape or play browser games such as 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 migrating to FarmVille: Tropic Escape.

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

Tomorrow, Zynga is closing FarmVille on Facebook after 11 years. I wanted to share the story of how we created him and why he played such an important role in the evolution of the game. 1 time

– pincus brand (@markpinc) December 31, 2020

“FarmVille has shown that a game can be a lively, lifelong service that can provide daily surprise and enjoyment, just like in a favorite television series,” Pincus wrote. “Games could also connect groups of people and bring them closer together. FarmVille launched a new category of ‘invest and express’ games, where players can invest time and express themselves to friends and family. Busy adults, especially women, have realized that games can be a big part of their lives and give you more than empty calories. “

How FarmVille was born

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

The publicity team was swift, under the leadership of Mark Skaggs and David Gray. The team were seated in an alcove near Pincus’ office. He met them daily. Within six weeks, they launched the original game on June 19 at 8 p.m. ET. The Facebook game was a spam headline, filling your news feed with your farm’s accomplishments. It warned you when your crops were ready and you harvested them just by clicking on them with a mouse. But it was easy to play for people who didn’t have much time. With simple mouse clicks you can plow, plant and harvest. The problem was you had to come back or your crops would wither. The players therefore got stuck in an addictive loop.

“Over the past few weeks, players around the world have reached out to me to share their stories and thank me for the game,” Skaggs said in a message to GamesBeat. “It’s humbling and heartwarming to see how gambling has touched people and is part of their lives. When I started making games in 1993, I had no idea that I would ever be a part of something this big, or that I would play around the world, like FarmVille. We did that at one particular point in 2009, right after the recession and early in the summer, when Facebook was getting really big, that Zynga was able to support it, because the Amazon cloud was mature enough, as a women and casual gamers around the world were up for something new. “

It was an immediate viral hit and reached one million daily active users in its first week.

“The moment we achieved what we had shortly after launch was a highlight in my life and career,” Mahajan said in a message to GamesBeat. “We really caught the lightning in a bottle.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had asked Pincus to send all the content possible because Facebook had just opened the newsfeed to app developers.

“FarmVille became the first major game to take advantage of the News Feed as an extension of the base game,” said Pincus.

At one point in 2013, FarmVille had 17 players in the Vatican. Zynga beat every other farm game – at least until Supercell’s Hay Day came along in 2012 – because their game was a lot simpler to play and a lot easier to share with friends. It was a lesson in accessibility.

In a message to GamesBeat, former Zynga engineer Yang said that Volume Life’s intellectual property is in its game engine, which can leverage the cloud. This made it easier to increase computing resources as the game’s user base soared. The life cycle engine then became a staple of new Zynga games.

The game grew to over 83 million players in 2010. This allowed Zynga to keep playing (apparently) forever, and Zynga’s mission became to produce “forever franchises”. He had an advantage over others because he could promote his new games on FarmVille player newsfeeds, at least until Facebook decided to cut back on the practice.

“A special team of individuals have come together to make it happen,” Skaggs said. “I smile thinking about all of this. I am grateful to all the players and that the game is part of an incredible story in the game. “

This helped propel Zynga to the top of Facebook games and ultimately saw Zynga go public with a valuation of $ 9 billion 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 the players. Proponents of blockchain – the secure 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 goes down, the player can take these digital items and use them in another game if possible, thanks to blockchain verification. It is only now that some of these games are being made where users can actually own what they buy.

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