Popular Facebook Game FarmVille Will Shut Down On December 31

Topline

FarmVille, the once-popular Facebook game that was played by millions, is shutting down on December 31st, the game’s developer Zynga announced in a blog post on the game’s website.

Key Facts

Players will still be allowed to play the game till December 31, however, the purchase of in-game virtual items will be disabled from November 17.

Like many other browser-based games from the 2000s, Farmville was built using Adobe’s Flash which was the most ubiquitous software used to build and distribute multimedia content on the web.

Both Adobe and Facebook have announced that they will completely stop supporting Flash after December 31st.

Web browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari will also be dumping Flash support by the end of this year.

Zynga said it plans to release a new version of the game called FarmVille 3 on mobile platforms soon, FarmVille 2 had also been released on mobiles.

Big Number

83 million. That is the total number of monthly active players FarmVille saw at the peak of its popularity in 2010, a year after it launched. This was reportedly more than twice the number of its next closest competitor on the platform.

Tangent

The end of Flash support on browsers and devices means that some of the most popular browser-based games for the early days of the internet will be rendered unplayable after December 31. Flashpoint, a software preservation effort, is attempting to salvage the situation by archiving as many such games as possible. According to the Flashpoint website, it has managed to create backups of 59,000 games so far, but this does not include Farmville or other server-based or commercially sold games.

Key Background

In 2017, Adobe announced that it was planning to end support for Flash in 2020. Flash is used by a number of websites hosting games, video clips and education software, all of which will stop working once support is removed from browsers. While extremely popular Flash was proprietary software that was often riddled with compatibility and security issues. This led to websites and platforms moving to the more modern and open HTML5 format.

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