FarmVille was developed by Zynga, a game studio founded in June 2007 by Mark Pincus and co-founders Michael Luxton, Eric Schiermeyer, Justin Waldron, Andrew Trader, and Steve Schoettler.
The game was reportedly built in only about six weeks and released on Facebook on June 19, 2009. Growth was immediate and explosive: FarmVille reached one million daily active users within four days of launch, and grew to roughly 30 million users within six months.
At its peak in 2011, FarmVille and its Facebook-native design had helped Zynga reach over 300 million monthly users across its game portfolio, and FarmVille alone was reported to generate a substantial share of Facebook's total revenue at the time — figures cited at close to a fifth of it.
FarmVille was the first major Facebook game to post directly into a player's News Feed, turning ordinary social browsing into free advertising for the game. That single mechanic is widely credited as the reason FarmVille's growth outpaced nearly everything else on the platform in 2009 and 2010.
The success led to a full franchise: FarmVille 2 launched in September 2012, and FarmVille 3 followed in November 2021 as a mobile-first title. Across the whole franchise, FarmVille has been installed more than 700 million times.