History & Development

• Origins
• Peak popularity
• Growing the game
• Awards
• Later years and sequels
• Sources

FarmVille was an agriculture-simulation game made by Zynga for Facebook. It launched on June 19, 2009 and became the defining game of the social-gaming boom: it reached one million daily players just four days after launch, and it was the most popular game on Facebook for over two years.

Origins#

The idea came to Zynga from a small team from the University of Illinois, who pitched a farming game based on an earlier Sims-style browser game. The first version was built in roughly five weeks. Farming games were already popular on social networks at the time — Happy Farm in China and Farm Town on Facebook came first — but FarmVille's polish and Zynga's marketing quickly made it the biggest of them.

Peak popularity#

FarmVille peaked in March 2010 with 83.76 million monthly active players and around 34.5 million daily players. Its social design was a large part of that growth: neighbors helped each other's farms, sent gifts, and shared feed posts that brought new players in. At its height, more people had a FarmVille farm than there were farms in the United States.

Growing the game#

Zynga updated FarmVille almost every week. Over its lifetime the game added:

• thousands of limited-time crops, animals, trees, buildings, and decorations, many tied to holidays and seasons — see the Game Catalog for every item;
• Collections of rare drops found while harvesting;
• mastery, co-op farming jobs, crafting cottages, and bushels;
• expansions that made the home farm bigger (see Expansions);
• entirely new themed farms that players could travel between, beginning with English Countryside in 2011 (see Themed Farms);
• a steady stream of story quests, many of them preserved in the Quest Archive.

Awards#

• Game Developers Conference — Best New Social/Online Game (2010). The crowd famously booed the Zynga executive who accepted it, a sign of how divided the industry was about social games.
• Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences — Social Networking Game of the Year.

Later years and sequels#

As Facebook gaming cooled, FarmVille slowly declined: by May 2012 it was the 7th most popular game on Facebook, and by April 2016 it had fallen to 110th. Zynga continued the series elsewhere:

In May 2022, Take-Two Interactive completed its acquisition of Zynga, and with it the FarmVille series.

See also: Shutdown & Legacy, Charity & Partnerships.

Sources#

• FarmVille — Wikipedia
• Take-Two completes $12.7bn acquisition of Zynga — iGB