Gaming
Your crops are dying with 2020. FarmVille shuts down at the end of the year.
“We’re aware that many of you have been with us since the very beginning, helping to build an incredible global community of players over the years who’ve enjoyed this game just as much as we have. For that we say thank you.”
Zynga, in a statement.
The cursed year of 2020 has finally come to claim the last of the early-aughts for good. FarmVille, the ridiculously popular Facebook farming simulator, is shutting down on December 31, 2020, creator Zynga said in a post on its website.
“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 company wrote.
The company’s decision to sunset the popular game is a direct consequence of the death of Adobe’s Flash Player. The much-maligned programming platform isn’t going to be updated on any web browsers after 2020, which means FarmVille will no longer be able to run.
While our constant nostalgia is reeling a bit from the announcement, it’s obvious at this point that we’ve progressed beyond the need for a Flash-based farming simulator in the new decade. Still, the game’s death is somewhat monumental; look how far we’ve come since.
Important but severely dated — FarmVille was one of the first internet games to go truly viral. If you had a Facebook account in 2009, you definitely knew what the game was — or at least had an idea of its existence, thanks to its pervasive notifications.
At its peak just over a decade ago, FarmVille had something like 83 million monthly active users. It was the most popular game on Facebook for more than two years and, by 2012, had still managed to rank as the seventh-most-popular game on the network.
Nothing about FarmVille holds up in 2020. Its dated mechanics and repetitive gameplay just can’t hold a candle to the kind of gaming we’re accustomed to now. Still, though, we would be remiss not to mention its impact. Absurd, mindless internet games just wouldn’t be the same without FarmVille. Neither would Facebook’s gaming platform, which at this point is fully-fledged and ready to take on major competitors like Twitch.
Bet you thought you’d seen the last of me — But wait — there’s more. Zynga isn’t ready to really throw in the proverbial towel just yet. There’s apparently a FarmVille 3 in the works somewhere in the recesses of Zynga’s hard drives.
“We look forward to you joining us in Farmville 2: Tropic Escape, Farmville 2: Country Escape and the upcoming worldwide launch of FarmVille 3 on mobile,” the company wrote in its elegy for the original game.
So we have that to look forward to, if nothing else.