But most of you are likely to stop playing the original FarmVille years ago, if you want to have one last nostalgic hit, today is officially the last day you can play on Facebook.
Zynga announced the decision in early September, warning of the seemingly zero number of FarmVille fans still playing the original game. It’s a bit disconcerting, considering the original FarmVille debuted 11 years ago in 20090, and has since generated FarmVille 2, FarmVille 2: Country Escape, i FarmVille 3. To be fair, FarmVille would probably have continued had it not been for the game running Flash and Adobe finally Flash killed this year.
Still, while the popularity of the original game since then it has diminished, there was once FarmVille defined the Facebook experience. Sign in and friends you hadn’t spoken in years and had left you with a landslide of notifications and blows, asking for help from his virtual farm. The sages of us ignored the notifications. The rest of us finally let ourselves be absorbed in a foolish game of planting virtual tomatoes and carrots, which were then harvested and exchanged for … buildings and shit collectibles. Some of us may have even spent real money to speed up unbearable waiting times, because who wants to stare at a strawberry swirl for four hours. Some of usnot this writer, no, no sir–you may have forgotten to set an alarm and logged in in a smidge too late, just for find finger the strawberry crop had withered and died.
Jof that you have never found yourself questioning your existence, wondering why you, an otherwise rational individual, will be tempted to spend real money and a lot of money earned in a weird mobile game, you can thank FarmVille for that. Although FarmVille did not invent game mechanics like real-time loops or booty boxes, yes he played a massive role in its popularization for the main current. Saga of Candy Crush, Angry Birds and all those others free games with annoying microtransactions in the app grabbed a page from the FarmVille gamebook. That said, its success also changed the landscape of the games, inviting developers to occasionally create 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 News. By 2013 it had already accumulated $ 1 billion in total player purchases. His death will not leave a massive hole in mobile games; there is, after all, infinity Similar playoff games (as well as several official FarmVille sequels and expansions). It is, however, an important fact is part of the history of modern games, as it is the dubious legacy he leaves behind.
Out of curiosity, I tried logging in to my old FarmVille farm. I imagined everything would be withered and dead. I received several warnings that FarmVille was about to die and that, to get one last nostalgic ride, I would have to install a Zynga Flash connector. I did the thing. I was wrapped up in various notifications of competitions and events within the game that I had missed. All loaded so slowly. Somehow my fruit trees hadn’t died yet more than 10 years of abandonment. For reasons I can’t explain, I planted 10 strawberry spots that I won’t check or harvest before this game dies. Then several more pop-ups hit me. After closing the browser frustrated, I remembered why I left this game in the first place.