Although most of you probably stopped playing the original Farmville centuries ago, if you want to get one last hit of nostalgia, today is officially the last day you can play the game on Facebook.
Zynga announced the decision earlier in September, warns the apparently non-zero number of FarmVille fans still playing the original game. It’s a little staggering, considering the original FarmVille was first launched 11 years ago in 20090, and has since emerged FarmVille 2, FarmVille 2: Country Escape, en FarmVille 3. To be honest, FarmVille would probably have continued if it were not for the game on Flash and Adobe finally killed Flash this year.
Still, while the popularity of the original game has declined since then, there was once a time when FarmVille defined the Facebook experience. You would log in and friends you have not spoken to in years, has left you a large amount of notifications and messages, to ask for help on their virtual farm. The wise among us ignored the notices. The rest of us ended up struggling in a pointless game to plant virtual tomatoes and carrots, which were then harvested and exchanged for … crazy in-game collectibles and buildings. Some of us may have even spent real money speeding up unbearable waiting times, because who wants to stare at a strawberry spot for four hours? Some of us –not this author, no no, sir–may have forgotten to set an alarm and recorded to leave on a smidge, just to find said harvest strawberries withered and died.
If you have ever found question yourself your existence, and ask yourself why you, otherwise rational individuals, would be tempted to spend real, hard-earned money on a messy mobile game, you can thank FarmVille for that. Although FarmVille does not have game mechanics like real-time loops or booty boxing, it did play a major role in its popularization for the mainstream. Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, and all the others free games with furious microtransactions in the app, everyone took a page from FarmVille’s playbook. That said, its success has also changed the gameplay landscape and invited developers to create comfortable cell phone and browser games that appealed to broader demographics.
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At its peak, FarmVille had 32 million active users daily and in total 85 million players, according to the New York Times. By 2013, it had collected $ 1 billion in total player purchases. His death is not going to leave a big hole in mobile games; there is, yet innumerable playoff games that are similar (as well as several official sequels and expansions from FarmVille). However, it is important part of modern game history, as it is the dubious legacy it leaves behind.
Out of curiosity, I tried to sign up for my old FarmVille farm. I imagined that everything would wither and die. I was greeted with several notices that FarmVille is on the verge of dying, and that I need to install a Zynga Flash plug-in to get one last nostalgic delight. I did the thing. I was upset about several notices of competitions and contests I had missed. Everything loaded so slowly. Somehow my fruit trees did not die more than 10 years of neglect. For reasons I cannot explain, I have planted ten strawberry spots on which I will absolutely not see if it will harvest before this game dies. I was then hit with several more pop-ups. After closing my browser in frustration, I remembered why I stopped playing this game in the first place.