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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:
| Year | Release |
|---|---|
| 2011 | HTML5 version of FarmVille (October 13) |
| 2012 | FarmVille 2 (September) |
| 2014 | FarmVille 2: Country Escape for mobile (April 10) |
| 2021 | FarmVille 3 (November 4) |
In May 2022, Take-Two Interactive completed its acquisition of Zynga, and with it the FarmVille series.
See also: Shutdown & Legacy, Charity & Partnerships.