The farming-simulation game FarmVille has been famous among Facebook users and now has been discontinued after 11 years after its first launch in the year 2009. In September 2020, Zynga announced the closure of original FarmVille game on Facebook. It was a bold move after software company Adobe announced that it will stop to distribute Flash Player for web browsers as a result of which Facebook will stop to support Flash games on the platform. Adobe, that launched the Flash Player in the year 1996 has now pulled the plug of Flash Player and that has resulted in the closure of FarmVille.
Zynga said in a statement that Adobe will stop to distribute and update Flash Player for all web browsers and Facebook will stop to support Flash Games on the platform completely after 31st December, 2020. So, FarmVille will be affected as a result of this.
Zynga stopped the in-app purchases of the game on 17th November, 2020 and after that, the payment system of the game was completely turned off. FarmVille was a free-to-play game which let users spend real money to get certain crops or accelerate progress for their fields. Still, FarmVille fans will be able to play its follow-ups — FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape and the upcoming worldwide launch of FramVille 3 on mobile.
Mark Pincus, who is the co-founder and former CEO of Zynga shared a story on why the game was made and played an important role in the evolution of gaming at Twitter. Pincus said that the actual innovation of FarmVille was in making games accessible for busy adults and give them a place to invest and express themselves and be seen by people in their lives as creative. People considered FarmVille as a sort of Etch-a-Sketch. It was the first game at a level that leveraged big data and almost everything inside the game was tested and optimized. FarmVille became a training ground for a generation of entrepreneurs and product managers.
Pincus also added that FarmVille was able to demonstrate that a game can be a living., always-on service that can deliver daily surprise and delight, just like our favourite TV series. Gamers can also connect groups of people and bring them closer together.