although most of you probably stopped playing the original FarmVille a long time ago, if you want to get a last dash of nostalgia, today is officially the last day you can play the game on Facebook.
Zynga announced the decision earlier in September, warning the seemingly non-zero number of FarmVille fans who are still playing the original game. It’s a little mind-boggling, given the original FarmVille first debuted 11 years ago in 20090, and has spawned ever since Farm village 2, FarmVille 2: Country Escape, and FarmVille 3. To be fair, FarmVille probably would have moved on if the game weren’t on Flash and Adobe finally killed Flash this year.
Still, while the popularity of the original game has since declined, There was once a time when FarmVille defined the Facebook experience. You would log in and friends who you hadn’t spoken to in years had had a landslide of notifications and pokes, to ask for help on their virtual farm. The wise among us ignored the reports. The rest of us ended up getting sucked into a mindless game of planting virtual tomatoes and carrots, which were then harvested and exchanged for … worthless in-game collectibles and buildings. Some of us may have even spent real money speeding up insufferable wait times, because who wants to stare at a strawberry field for four hours. Some of us-not this writer, no, no sir–maybe forgot to set an alarm and logged in on a smidge too late, only to liked said the crop of strawberries was withered and dead.
If you’ve ever found questioning your existence, wondering why you, an otherwise rational individual, would be tempted to spend money real, hard-earned money on a trashy mobile game, you can thank FarmVille for that. While FarmVille game mechanics such as realtime loops or loot Boxes, it played an enormous role in popularizing it for the mainstream. Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds and all those others free-to-play games with annoying in-app microtransactions all took a page from FarmVille’s playbook. That said, its success also changed the game landscape, inviting developers to create casual mobile and browser games that appealed to a wider demographic.
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At its peak, FarmVille had 32 million daily active users and a total of 85 million players, according to the New York Times. It was collected in 2013 $ 1 billion in total player purchases. Her death won’t leave a huge hole in mobile gaming; there are, finally uncountable knock-off games that look just like this (as well as various official FarmVille sequels and expansions). However, it is an important one part of modern game history, as it is the dubious legacy it leaves behind.
Out of curiosity, I tried to log into my old FarmVille farm. I imagined everything would be withered and dead. I was greeted with several notices that FarmVille was about to die, and that to get one last nostalgic joyride I would need to install a Zynga Flash plugin. I did it. I was inundated with several reports of matches and in-game events that I had missed. Everything was loading so slowly. Somehow my fruit trees hadn’t died despite more than 10 years of neglect. For reasons I can’t explain, I’ve planted 10 strawberry patches that I absolutely won’t be checking or harvesting until this game dies. I was then hit with several more popups. After I closed my browser in frustration, I remembered why I quit this game in the first place.