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

Adobe is Exit Flash Today’s program, I will go with it The original FarmVille from Zynga Game from 2009.

This puts an end to an era of social gaming that will be remembered in history with mixed feelings. Some people hated FarmVille’s random nature and boring gameplay, while others appreciated what it tried to do in making the games more social and attractive to untapped demographics like older women.

After today, Flash will no longer be supported by browsers and Facebook, as web technologies such as HTML5. This means Flash-based FarmVille won’t work anymore. Instead of adapting the original game to run on HTML5, Zynga chose to discontinue the social game. Those who still play can go to FarmVille: Tropic Escape or play games on the browser like FarmVille2: Tropic Escape, FarmVille 2: Country Escape, and FarmVille 2.

Zynga stopped accepting in-game payments in November, and introduced a bonus package for those who migrate 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 shuts down the FarmVille Facebook app after 11 years. I wanted to share the story of how we created it and why it played such an important role in the evolution of games. 1 / s

– Mark Pincus (@markpinc) December 31, 2020

Pincus wrote: “FarmVille has demonstrated that a game can be a live and always-on service that can deliver daily surprise and happiness, similar to your favorite TV series.” Games can also connect groups of people and bring them closer together. FarmVille has launched a new category of ‘investing and expressing’ games, in which players can invest time and express themselves to friends and family. Busy adults, especially women, have seen games can have a place. They are valuable in their lives and give you more than just empty calories. “

How Farmville appeared

Before FarmVille, Zynga’s most successful game was Zynga Poker. In May 2009, Zynga acquired MyMiniLife, and directed its four engineers – Amit Mahajan, Joel Poloni, Luke Rajlich, and Sizao Zhao Yang – to create a social farm game. Other titles like Farm Town, MyFarm, and Happy Farm have seen success on social platforms, so Zynga is late to its social farm party. And it has long been criticized for cloning other games and making it more successful than the original games.

The MyMiniLife team moved quickly, under the direction of Mark Skaggs and David Gray. The team sat in a skylight by Pincus’ office. He met them daily. In six weeks, they launched the original game on June 19, at 8 PM. The Facebook game was a spam headline, filling your newsfeed with your farm’s achievements. It notified you when your crops were ready, and you harvested them simply by clicking on them with the 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 catch was you had to return or wither your crops. So players got stuck in a cycle of addiction.

“In the past few weeks, players from all over the world have called me to share their stories and thank me for the game,” Skaggs said in a message to GamesBeat. “It’s very humbling and heartwarming to see how the game has affected people and has become a part of their lives. When I started making games in 1993, I had no idea that I would be involved in something so big, or playing around the world, like FarmVille. We got to a special phase in time, 2009, right after the recession and in the beginning of the summer, just as Facebook was really growing up, that Zynga was able to support it, that the Amazon cloud was mature enough, like women regular players around the world were ready for something new “.

It was an instant viral hit and reached 1 million daily active users in its first week.

“The moment we realized what we had in mind shortly after its launch was a milestone in my life and my career,” Mahajan said in a message to GamesBeat. “We’ve really caught the lightning in a bottle.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked Pincus to send all the content he could send, as Facebook just opened the newsfeed to app developers.

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

Sometime, in 2013, The FarmVille team had 17 players In the Vatican. Zynga beat all the other farm games – at least until Hay Day’s appearance in Supercell in 2012 – because its game was much easier to play and much easier to share with friends. It was a lesson in accessibility.

In a letter to GamesBeat, former Zynga engineer Yang said that MyMiniLife’s intellectual property is in its game engine, which can click on the cloud. This made it easy to expand computing resources as the game’s user base increased. The MyMiniLife Engine then became a staple in the new Zynga games.

The game had grown to over 83 million players by 2010. This enabled Zynga to continue the game (apparently) forever, and Zynga’s mission became to produce “forever franchises”. It had an advantage over others because it could promote its new games in the FarmVille players’ news feed, at least until Facebook decided to curtail the practice.

“A special team of people came together to make this happen,” said Skaggs. “I am smiling as I think about everything. I am grateful to all the players and that the game was part of an amazing part of gaming history.”

It helped push Zynga to the top of the Facebook game heap, and eventually enabled Zynga to 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 FarmVille end is a lesson for gamers. Advocates of the 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, then players can actually own the items they buy. If one game is turned off, the player can take these digital items and use them in another game if possible, thanks to blockchain verification. Only now some of these games are being created where users can actually own what they buy.

One of these games It was recently created by a team led by Eric Schiermeyer, Zynga’s co-founder.