In a blog post, Zynga announced the upcoming shutdown of its fan-favorite game, which saw a peak player base of 83 million during its heydays in 2010. The move comes after Adobe announced the end of life for the Adobe Flash Player, which was widely used in the design and development of browser-based games like FarmVille.
"Thank You," Fertilized with Love and Beautiful Memories
"Following an incredible 11 years since its initial launch back in 2009, we are officially announcing the closure of the original FarmVille game on Facebook," the blog post from Zynga started.
Players can still tend to their virtual farms, but only up until December 21, 2020. Furthermore, the purchase of in-game items will only be available until November 17, with Zynga permanently shutting down the game's payment system afterwards. Purchases and refunds will no longer be entertained after the payment system closure.
Zynga advised their players to use their remaining credits before the game completely shuts down. However, the game devs announced that they will still launch "fun in-game activities to be announced soon," designed to make the last weeks of the hit Flash game enjoyable.
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FarmVille is a social network game based on simulating an agricultural setup, first launched as one of the games available in Facebook back in 2009. Its gameplay revolves around various farm management tasks like plowing land, growing and harvesting crops, raising livestock, and many more. While the game is mostly free-to-play, players can advance faster in the game by purchasing items and currency with real-world money.
As Facebook's largest video game, it logged around 83.76 million monthly active users, with daily active users reaching a peak of 34.5 million users in March 2010.
FarmVille has spawned a number of sequels such as FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape and FarmVille 2: Country Escape. Also, Zynga will be releasing FarmVille 3 on mobile platforms in the future.
Ahead of its scheduled shutdown, the developers expressed gratitude to its users via a Facebook post. "Thank you is a small word but when fertilized with love and beautiful memories it means the world to us," the caption read.
The End of an Era
The plan to shut down Adobe Flash Player support has been determined since July 2017. Adobe cited the existence of open standards like WebGL, HTML5, and WebAssembly as viable alternatives to their own multimedia standard, with major browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome integrating the open standards and pushing other plug-ins aside, lke Flash Player. The three years between 2017 and the 2020 EOL was meant to allow the developers to migrate their existing content to the new open standards.
This EOL for the Flash Player translates to most of the online games created in early 2000s becoming unplayable. However, in an attempt to preserve these games, the Flashpoint initiative has gone underway. So far, the developers behind the effort claim to have backed up close to 60,000 games so far, but not including Farmville or most of Facebook's server-based games.
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