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Zynga shuts down FarmVille after 11 years
- rightbyte 6y agoI kinda disgust me that he seems proud of pioneering selling in-game resources for cash feeding of feeble minded and children.
- sergiomattei 6y agoThey built a widely used and loved product, why not be proud?
- prepend 6y agoShould Cambridge Analytica love that its Facebook quizzes were widely used and loved? It’s a bad product that people get addicted to, so I wouldn’t want to work on it, much less be proud of it. It would be like being proud of inventing banner ads, or spam, or artificial trans fats, or telemarketing robocalls, etc etc
- watwut 6y ago> It’s a bad product that people get addicted to, Every time I hear about people having issues with partner being addicted to gaming, the game in question is PC or console game. Typically competitive online one, sometimes single player. It is rarely mobile game, like I never heard people complain about partner being addicted to Farmville. But, somehow, those games get defended each time.
- ratww 6y agoThe problem here is not the addiction to the game itself, but rather to the fact that sometimes they become a gambling addiction issue, with all the issues it brings. It ends up being a money pit for some people, with the worst offenders spending thousands of dollars a month on pay-to-play mobile games. Gambling addiction is also something that's normally hidden from the partner, and mobile games are great at allowing that, so there's also this difference. The partner won't see the issue until it's too late.
- watwut 6y agoThe thread was about addiction and anyway, calling these gambling is a stretch. You do know about partners gambling and people do complain about it. The partner and kids are typically the person who get the most of consequences. But my other point was about hypocrisy. People here go at length hating on Farmville and talking about addiction, because Farmville is not cool in their social circles and is game they personally dont like. You do not get the same outcry about games that are actually the most frequently mentioned by people who deal with gaming addiction issues. Those games are mentioned either positively or not at all. And if you would call the people who play those games feeble minded, you would not ended up upvoted.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoThey are considered psychologically akin to gambling, are being investigated in several countries under their relation with gambling, and at least one country (Belgium) has declared them to be gambling.
- watwut 6y agoAnd plenty of others concluded that calling Farmville gambling is absurd stretch. Besides, I found that Overwatch, FIFA 18, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive at considered "game of chance" in Belgium, because you place bet and win or loose. Not clickers like Farmville. I did not found a single article that would implied so.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoBecause Farmville is irrelevant today ?
- pfisch 6y agoI feel like what is ignored in these conversations is that the vast majority of users just play this game as an entertaining piece of art. ~1% of problem users get addicted to games, whether they are FarmVille or smash brothers. That is just the way it is. It isn't right to squash the freedom of the vast majority of people because a small subset of users lack self control.
- ergocoder 6y agoIn other news, water is evil because someone drank too much water and died. These critics are unreal.
- prepend 6y agoMost people play the lotto to release stress. But there are quite a few who abuse it (or it abuses them). I think it depends on the net benefits. It’s odd to pose it as “squashing freedom” as I don’t think that anyone is proposing that FarmVille be banned or made illegal. I just think it’s a bad thing to make and not something to be proud of. “I made a thing that lots of people like, but pisses lots of people off, is responsible for needless deaths, and lots of people wasted money.”
- pfisch 6y agoI think you could contort logic to make any creation "bad" for some subset of people. Is any videogame a bad thing to make? What about movies that arguably can inspire mass shooters or other negative events to occur. Can the creators of smash brothers or dota not be proud either? Those games fuck some small subset of people up too. I played smash brothers for thousands of hours myself.
- Traubenfuchs 6y agoSame applies to drugs. Those game are micro-optimized to trick people into paying money for it. No one would ever say "The money I spent on farmville was well spent".
- wesleywt 6y agoHow do you know this? A Farmville player might have been proud of his/her farm? It might have given them hours of pleasure and joy. Why should you dictate what they should feel?
- giancarlostoro 6y agoHell people who buy games literally say “I have no regret buying this sooner” I say it myself all the time!
- sergiomattei 6y agoI paid for a builder on Clash of Clans, a similar game. I didn't regret it, it added quite a bit to the game. People buy what they like. Just because you dislike Farmville doesn't give you the right to invalidate everyone else's enjoyment of the game.
- antihero 6y agoHeroin is also a widely used and loved product.
- sergiomattei 6y agoHow is heroin even remotely relevant to a Facebook game?
- antihero 6y agoBoth are engineered to be highly addictive and people spend a huge amount of money on them, to the point that people could say that it is widely used and loved, despite being a detriment to users and society as a whole.
- ergocoder 6y agoThat's not true. Most people hate Heroin. Some love it, of course.
- antihero 6y agoIt's hugely pernacious in our culture though, lots of songs and film reference it - obviously there's a lot of bad press but it is also hugely romanticised. A lot of the users thoroughly enjoy it, much like Farmville.
- dillondoyle 6y agoIt's great until it's not - story of most addictions
- nefitty 6y agoI sympathize with your feeling, but it’s a little astonishing how easily “hacked” human brains are. I don’t think you have to be feeble minded or a child to spend hundreds of dollars a week on digital avatars.
- rightbyte 6y agoYe, but most people are not falling for it. A very low share get bitten for real. "Up to 50% of revenue comes from 0.15% (15 in 10,000) of players" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play With 'feeble minded' I meant weak versus addiction. Maybe not the 100% correct term. The thing I don't like about online gambling is that it can be hidden by the addicts. I mean sure it is their money to do whatever with, but it might still be shady immoral practice to enable that, like casinos or Farmville.
- spiritplumber 6y agohttps://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/ https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/ Obligatory
- paulpauper 6y agoif you compare the share prices of fakebook and zynga, it is evident selling personal data is more lucrative than selling game tokens
- giancarlostoro 6y agoI feel like had smartphones not come sooner Zynga could of reached a point where they would of outright bought out Facebook. Smartphones were just slowly becoming relevant during these years. I almost want to call it the Eternal September Part 2 when Facebook took off like wildfire on the last year or so of MySpace being relevant. Smartphones taking off specifically Android meant people could just play games on their phone and not have to wait to get home to a computer.
- jabl 6y agoMaybe there are other less shady ways of earning a living than selling people's privacy or profiteering of their addiction?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- worker767424 6y agoGoogle and Facebook don't really sell personal data, and least not directly. They might buy some, and advertisers happily give them data, but I rarely hear about them actually selling it. They do let advertisers run ads that are targeted using this data, but that's not the same as "felling personal data." It's more like selling user attention.
- Aeolun 6y agoWell, you kind of need to deceive yourself in this way if you want to justify your work to yourself. Kind of easy if it makes you tons of money.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoIndeed it is a very common pattern. People tend to believe whatever is convenient (read: self serving) for them to believe.
- dibujaron 6y ago"it is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding"
- watwut 6y agoYou hate all game companies in the same way? Or just the ones that make games that are not exactly for you?
- rightbyte 6y agoCome on you know what I mean ...
- theshrike79 6y agoIt's just about the feedback loop. People were addicted to games long before micro-transactions. Tetris has sucked countless hours out of peoples' lives. Hell, I even almost lost a job because of Civilization 3. I'm completely unable to play "one more turn" style games in moderation. Mobile games are optimised so that players like to spend time playing the game, and have the option of exchanging money for time in-game. You can either grind (use time) or spend money (use less time). If people enjoy the game and want to spend money to get ahead, they have the option. No one is forcing payments, it usually goes badly for the game.
- mhh__ 6y agoWalterBright could probably comment on that as Empire (although long before my time) is apparently one of the first career-ruining-ly addictive games.
- ransom1538 6y agoI do not understand the legal consequences of this. There were whales that paid thousands to have items in the game - those just vanish? Edit: These whales took the game seriously. "Meet you at the office to discuss something" serious. I expect a class action very quickly. Disclosure: worked at zynga.
- extrememacaroni 6y agoI too think it's preposterous that it's somehow okay for companies to simply make disappear things you've bought/spent money on/anything like that. This is the main reason I avoid games like this. It's just a trap, nothing keeps the developer from retiring the game whenever it feels like, nothing keeps the developer from releasing an update that completely changes how the game plays. If you like a game now, next week they can rebalance it and introduce microtransactions and that's... perfectly okay it seems?
- trash3 6y agoReminds me of me of the Green Kayle skin I bought in League of Legends almost a decade ago. Pricks changed the base design of the model and did so for the paid skin as well.
- jabl 6y agoSeems to be a common pattern. Eg in world of tanks/warships, there are "premium" tanks/ships you can buy for money and which are slightly better than the free vehicles at the same tier. While they are decent enough to not reduce the specs of stuff people have paid for, what they do is boost other vehicles and introduce new ones, which over time has the same effect.
- Santosh83 6y agoIf you don't pay for physical products or tangible/useful services, then that's what happens. But look at it the bright side. The kind of people who burn cash on games would have instead thrown them on drugs, cigarettes, online gambling, or something even worse had these avenues never existed.
- d99kris 6y agoI guess one can assume Zynga didn't make enough money from FarmVille to justify porting it to a modern platform. I wonder if they considered a kickstarter or similar, to gauge the interest of their users to finance the porting.
- ncw96 6y agoThey actually did make a mobile version, but it is not compatible with the old Flash version that was discontinued.
- jabl 6y agoI guess Hay Day took over the farming game market on mobile.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoFarmVille probably lost its popularity. I can’t remember the last I ever heard anybody talking about it, and I doubt a lot of people can remember. Its pretty much dead by now.
- theshrike79 6y agoThere were like 3-4 variants of Farmville 2 and FV3 is out in some countries: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zynga.farmville3 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zynga.farm...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- IgorPartola 6y agoA family member of mine got horribly addicted to FarmVille back in like 2008-2009. He would sneak off from the family to go upstairs to grab something and then we would find him there three hours later playing. He built up a huge farm and since it had the mechanic for visiting nearby farms became quite famous. Then one of his daughters, who was a freshman in college at the time, came home with a few of her friends. The family member mentioned FarmVille at one point and all these teenagers went “omg you are [his game name]?!?!?!” He quite literally became an in game celebrity for a time apparently. He quit a few months later and never went back.
- yashap 6y agoFarmVille launched June 2009, so it probably wasn’t 2008 :) But yeah, video game addiction is a real thing, I know lots of people who’ve been addicted to all sorts of games, to the detriment of their lives overall.
- IgorPartola 6y agoYup you are right. He got in right at the start.
- yashap 6y agoTotal tangent, but Malcolm Gladwell has two really excellent podcast episodes about memory (Revisionist History, season 3, episodes 3 and 4: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/23-a-polite-word-for-liar-memory-part-1 http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/23-a-polite-word-for-...). Basically, it’s WAY less accurate than we think, and the least accurate part is everything about time - when things happened, and even the order than they happened in. Worth a listen if you have some time to kill.
- therealx 6y agoMy favorite story: growing up, I was really good friends with this girl who's Mom was an Everquest dev (like, the first one.) Post-launch, she became so addicted to her own game, she had to quit her job and lived in a small apt, forgoing clothes and only eaing the easiest of food. At the time it was funny...
- k__ 6y ago"first game at scale that leveraged big data" Haha, yes, but not for the good of their customers. It was optimized for addiction and peer pressure.
- pram 6y agoFlash games on Facebook feels very quaint now. It makes me remember all the other dead web 1.0 walled gardens like AOL games, Yahoo games, MSN games etc The crappy shovelware games live on though! Seems to be a resilient style of software, moving from platform to platform like a virus lol
- whoknew1122 6y agoI sunk over $2,000 in a game that shut down abruptly (Marvel Heroes). It sucked. I had no recourse. But at the end of the day, I had well more than 2000 hours in the game. Which meant that my cost per hour of entertainment was less than $1. Which is really cheap as far as hobbies and entertainment goes. Does it suck that I can't go in any play an ARPG with any of the 50+ Marvel heroes I had and adore? Yes. But that's what you should expect when playing any game that operates as a service or has an always-online component.
- bluedino 6y agoOne summer I played Gauntlet Legends in the local arcade, I basically maxed out all of my characters, I probably had $200 into it. One day the game crashed, and the repair guy stuck a new hard drive in the game, and I lost all my characters. :(
- thih9 6y agoI didn’t realise that there were arcade games with save game support. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_Legends https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_Legends > Its unusual features for an arcade game included passwords and characters that could be saved, enabling players to play over the course of a long period.
- heimatau 6y ago> I had well more than 2000 hours in the game. Which meant that my cost per hour of entertainment was less than $1. I remember when one could buy a game for $50 and play it for 250-400 hours (unlocking hidden things, playing with multiple friends with just my purchase). Roughly a dime for entertainment. In some cases, it was sub a penny USD. You have some expensive hobbies my friend.
- whoknew1122 6y agoIs it really expensive though? I don't go out to bars. Those nights out add up quickly. I'm not into cars, which is a large money sink. I don't go to the movies, which is typically $20+ per person for 2-ish hours of entertainment when it's all said and done. Adult hobbies are expensive. $2,000 spent across 4 years which gave me thousands of hours of enjoyment really isn't that expensive.
- cblconfederate 6y ago> The real innovation of FarmVille was in making games accessible to busy adults, giving them a place to invest and express themselves and be seen by people in their lives as creative Zynga was ripping off games that were popular in places like china, they had zero innovation, not even in their slimy tactics to recruit users. They used to have those "invite 10 friends to be able to play" that everyone had back then. they abused every possible channel to the maximum degree, that's their only 'innovation'. They were the reason that facebook created rules that ban those shady tactics, even though they had a special agreement with facebook (basically so they can spam more than indies and competitors). And a lot of more shady antics i can't even remember, they were all discussed in facebook's old developer forum which has been shut down long ago. Zynga was not "the first" in anything
- markus_zhang 6y agoIt's all about monitization bro.
- harryf 6y agoRemember wandering up to the Zynga booth at LeWeb years ago - perhaps 2010 - and asking them if employees at Zynga ever wondered if what the were doing might be evil or if the games were actually any good. It was unfair as the booth was actually manned by people from Dextrose AG who Zynga had just bought. To cap it off I made them watch this FarmVille parody which they were awkwardly amused by https://youtu.be/odBDAcOEKuI https://youtu.be/odBDAcOEKuI In retrospect I was being a righteous prick but I couldn’t stand Zynga - their games or their addiction based business model.
- cyberlurker 6y agoI did something similar to a Google employee once at a conference. Sorry to that person, I was also a righteous prick. Definitely not the right way to go about it.
- wpietri 6y agoDon't be too hard on yourself. Given that these companies are structured to keep criticism from reaching the people profiting from the bad decisions, there aren't a lot of good options. Giving an earful to somebody paid to be their buffer isn't great, but neither is just accepting the awfulness.
- kumarvvr 6y agoI hope this whole idea of game streaming and online only accounts for purchases has a permanent solution. Perhaps an non-profit controlled entity can be set up to transfer assets and management of such digital assets. Imagine losing all your Playstation games that are online only, because Sony went down the drain, or losing all your books because Amazon went belly up.
- kumarvvr 6y agoFor the love of god, I can never understand why this game became popular. I understand the pull of games and I am a gamer myself. However, compared to games like minecraft, this game was boring and absurd for me. Make digital farms, where's the fun in that? And I know intelligent, high calibre friends of mine spending hours on the game and hours talking about it. The sheer amount of lost productivity due to this game is astounding, and I say lost productivity because this damn game captured a whole lot of mindshare.
- chrisjs95 6y ago> Make digital farms, where's the fun in that? I mean you do that in Minecraft too haha.
- Lammy 6y ago> For the love of god, I can never understand why this game became popular. Imagine it's 2011, you haven't played a video game since Space Invaders, and you trade your carrier-subsidized Cingular-branded RAZR in for a carrier-subsidized iPhone 4. The number 1 app in the store is "Facebook" so you download it, sign up, and are suddenly spending all your time in their garden rekindling connections with everyone you ever knew. Seems like the perfect low-impact game to play with one finger on a smooth piece of glass, flipping back and forth between it and your FB Messages / comment-thread flamewars / etc.
- watwut 6y agoIt was not game for you, it is that simple. Minecraft is boring too many people too. But productivity loss is exactly same as when playing other games. People discussing this game are no different then people who discuss other games. What is unique is the pure outrage at the idea that people might enjoy it from gamers I see in this thread. Not do much you, but the anger and insults targeted at people who like it are way more that I expected.
- joveian 6y agoIt is an interesting setting that has been used successfully in other games as well, including Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, and just recently Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin.
- richardfey 6y agoLet's read now how to whitewash game addiction design..
- tsjq 6y agowhat does Zynga do these days .
- theshrike79 6y agoMobile games. CSR2, Harry Potter, Empires & Puzzles, Words with Friends, Zynga Poker. Yearly revenue around $1 billion.
- tsjq 6y agoWow that's nice
- Can_Not 6y agoHopefully all the farmville clones marketing themselves as simcity clones are next?
- Jare 6y agoA good time to remember this interview: https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark-pinkus-faceboo/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/zynga-scamville-mark-pinku... > I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. It's not specific to FarmVille, and I do agree that FarmVille deserves a place in history by turning player self-expression into a massively mainstream game feature.
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y agoIs there a viable (paid) FV alternative for seniors? Loved one (senior) spent hours on FV. I noted thru FB that FV kept this person going during COVID. I want to buy/suggest alternatives to FV. Person does not play video games. Not even casual mobile games. Eye-hand coordination is not great. Person has iPhone and ultralite Mac. Spends a lot of time on FB What are good alternatives ?
- manirelli 6y agoCheck out stardew valley. It has some extra depth but you can really play however you want. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stardew-valley/id1406710800 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stardew-valley/id1406710800
- BlueTemplar 6y agoI'm literally sitting right now next to a senior playing Spider Solitaire on his PC. AFAIK he plays it 30min - 1h every day that he's at home. Used to be the Windows 7 one (and I guess the WinXP one before that?), now it's a browser-based version…
- spiritplumber 6y agoI built part of that Zynga light tunnel thing that they had in their office at the time (We used Parallax Propellers to drive the LEDs). It was a fun project. Everyone I talked to while I was doing the work told me that the money was excellent but they hated working there.
- jvanderbot 6y agoI'm really sad about this. My dad has been playing for a decade, and occasionally brags about his farm. He's really found something to tinker with that brings him joy as he ages.
- chrisbennet 6y agoZygna was the company that threating to fire employees or take back stock. https://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stock-or-youll-be-fired/ https://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-s...
- scpedicini 6y agoAhh Zynga, the founder of which (Mark Pincus) is quoted by a former employee to have said, "I don't fucking want innovation. You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." Class act.
- Lammy 6y agoHe also lives in the famously-exclusionary Marin County coastal enclave of Bolinas that has prevented literally all growth since 1971 by refusing to issue any new water meters ever again. I wonder what was going on in the late-‘60s/early-‘70s that might have made people not want any new neighbors?
- elipsey 6y agoThis seems like an appropriate moment to remember Cow Clicker[1], and reflect on it's lesson: "The player is initially given a pasture with nine slots and a single plain cow, which the player may click once every six hours. Each time the cow is clicked, a point also known as a "click" is awarded; if the player adds friends' cows to their pasture, they also receive clicks added to their scores when the player clicks their own cow. As in other Facebook games, players are encouraged to post announcements to their news feed whenever they click their cow. A virtual currency known as "Mooney" can be bought with Facebook Credits; it can be used to purchase special "premium" cow designs, and the ability to skip the six-hour time limit that must be waited before the cow can be clicked again." "Unexpectedly to Bogost, Cow Clicker became a viral phenomenon[...]Although continually disturbed by its popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming and social networking trends;" "'bovine gods' eventually revealed that 'Cowpocalypse' would occur on July 21, 2011 (exactly one year since the original release of the game). From then on, every click made by players would deduct thirty seconds from a countdown clock leading to the Cowpocalypse. However, players could extend the countdown clock by paying to supplicate with Facebook Credits: paying 10 credits would extend the countdown by a single hour, while 4,000 would extend the countdown by an entire month. After $700 worth of extensions, the countdown clock expired on the evening of September 7, 2011. At this point, the game remained playable, but all the cows were replaced by blank spaces and said to have been raptured. Bogost intended the Cowpocalypse event to signal the "end" of the game to players; when addressing a complaint by a fan who felt the game was no longer fun after the cow rapture, Bogost responded that "it wasn't very fun before." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]