It’s over for FarmVille, because Flash also buys the farm

2020 isn’t the only thing that ends on Thursday. The last day of the year is also the last day of FarmVille, one of addicting facebook games.

FarmVille, which allowed gamers to cultivate colorful cartoonish farms while tending to crops and livestock, had 30 million daily players at its peak. But game developer Zynga announced in September, it would shut down gaming on December 31, the victim of Adobe’s decision to stop distributing and updating its Flash Player for web browsers, which led Facebook to announce the end of support for Flash games on its platform.

The writing is on the wall even longer. In 2017, Facebook – with Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla – have announced plans to end Flash support by December of this year.

Once the de facto standard for websites to run games, stream video, and stream animation on browser software, Flash Player has fallen out of favor with many tech companies and organizations, who poke fun at the plug-in in as battery and security vulnerability. Its popularity has waned in recent years as more and more people in the online video industry turn to HTML5, a developing language capable of running graphics without plugins.

And if you really want to keep fake farming, there are other options. The company will continue to operate FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape and FarmVille 2: Country Escape, and says gamers can look forward to the next global launch of FarmVille 3 for mobile.