Zynga shuts down FarmVille after 11 years
twitter.com
twitter.com
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
To cap it off I made them watch this FarmVille parody which they were awkwardly amused by 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.
I pointed out the obvious flaw in this (won’t they just not read the second dialog either?). They looked a little peeved and said they’d take my comment back to Redmond.
I still feel a bit bad about that, they we ok people and it wasn’t their fault.
"What's the second most popular farming simulator game on Facebook?"
The closest "rip off" to Harvest Moon would be Stardew Valley, but no one ever refers to it that way because rip off is not a useful term for conveying taxonomy. Rip off is only useful for displaying derision towards genres the writer doesn't enjoy.
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...
So sad.
Game mechanics gonna game mechanic, I guess. :)
I also have a friend who dropped out of high school for games, but it worked out! He became a fairly high end professional Counter-Strike player, moved to South Korea for awhile. Then when the CS professional scene stopped being as lucrative, online poker was taking off, he moved to online poker, and did VERY well financially off of that: https://www.sk-gaming.com/content/1844754-shaguar-to-run-cs-...
When he dropped out of high school to play CS, his parents were obviously very worried, but he treated it like a job and did really well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY2nxVNBHQs
The most famous meme being probably :
This applies really to anything you're passionate about.
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.
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?
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.
It's not easy to relinquish access to a computer and phone these days
I tend to get quite addicted to video games, but gave up on even trying those with these kinds of mechanics, as the reward/(danger+cost) ratio is just too bad.
All that said, I shed no tears for any comeuppance that gets delivered to those who willfully profit off of the misfortune of others.
Maybe so, but one would hope that even as far as self-destructive vices are concerned it's possible to pick something with more upside than Farmville addiction.
- Apple decided not to support Flash on mobile
- Everybody else decided to try and deprecate Flash as a browser plugin
- Adobe EOLed Flash
- Facebook EOLed support for Flash games
- Zynga EOLed FarmVille
"Whose fault this actually is" seems tricky enough to determine morally, let alone legally.
1. Should Zynga buy back those items at a lower price because they are used items?
2. What happens to cars (because we love car analogies) when the manufacturer stops building spare parts? In this case they are either collected from old cars or somebody else build those parts. Maybe should Zynga at least try to sell the game infrastructure with data? That would be like relying on third party spare parts but the car keeps going. Of course if nobody buys the game, maybe even for free, that's it
3. Other ideas?
By the way, this isn't the first time an online game shuts down and players lose everything, right?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a27021744/micros...
They probably had different terms of sale; buying books contingent on an external service is less attractive than buying in-game items contingent on the game.
> This was the correct response to shutting down servers.
Depending on the terms of sale, it may have been the minimum legally required response.
Zynga could offer to it's user to give their users credits to use in an alternate game, if they want.
To illustrate, if FarmVille were an offline game that costed $1000, I could still set up a Windows XP computer, install Flash, and play it. It's not trivial, but it's very doable and legal.
But instead, actual FarmVille is designed so that it needs an online infrastructure (so far so good, it's a core part of the game after all), but by design this infrastructure can only be provided by Zynga. You can't replicate it even if you want to.
In this case, I would say the moral fault lies mainly in Roblox, since they are the ones providing the platform and hence making the decision to exclusively provide the servers (and that moral fault has not yet happened, it would only happen if when they shut down they don't provide an alternative).
If you are someone building on top of Roblox, I don't think you deserve the same amount of fault, but it's certainly something you have to consider. It's also a risk in that building on top of this design leaves you open to being de-platformed (like, for example with the iOS Store if Apple doesn't like your application).
For what it's worth, I don't think Roblox or Zynga are immoral because of this, just that on this particular topic they are morally faulty.
My bar for what should be acceptable as a recourse is also not very high. Providing any form of alternative like LAN play, closed-source server software, specifications or interoperability with other software would be enough for me. The problem I see with the current situation is the "last resort recourse" there is now in most cases, reverse engineering, is legally shaky, generally against the terms of service, terribly complicated and expensive and not guaranteed to succeed if critical parts of the application are server-side.
Because they don't. A friend had to source BIOS chips for fried ones for an out of warranty CNC machine from around the world just to not have it fail completely.
I'm not saying companies should port their software to new operating systems and software stacks (presumably forever). The user would be responsible for providing whatever operating systems and software stack the program was built to work on.
What I'm saying is that it that companies should provide some way for users to continue using the product they bought, on the same software stack they were already using, when the company decides to shut it down. Anything better than the current situation where the online servers just go down and nothing is offered as an alternative would be much better. One pretty good way (but not the only one) they could do this is by releasing their server-side software, as it is. They don't need to open source it, they don't need to port it, and the user would be responsible for providing whatever underlying software stack it was designed to work on.
Zynga has a dozen high-performing games currently running, the original Farmville isn't one of those.
It seems like Adobe gave itself permission to control what is on my computer. But does it really have authority to do so?
Sure, killing Flash sucks for all the games, but Adobe isn’t really doing anything illegal.
HTML5 is not near to replace Flash, and with main propertiary platform owners controlling browser market, it may never become Flash replacement.
I'm surprised someone hasn't done that already?
The computers these people played on with auto-updates disabled, would continue to support Flash for eternity.
Your points would be valid if Zynga said "the thing you bought isn't going to run on new devices". But what they're saying is "we're breaking the thing you bought because not very many people can still give us money."
Purchases without a "XX years' functionality" label should be required to be functional in perpetuity or refunded.
Sorry, is this a reference to something?
Yup.
> These whales took the game seriously. "Meet you at the office to discuss something" serious. I expect a class action very quickly.
Very sure the terms of sale for those items made them contingent on the continuation of the service, which was expressly in Zynga’s discretion. Selling added privileges related to another service that only survive as long as the base service is offered is fairly routine; there's nothing novel happening here, even prior to online games with premium items (of which this is not the first to shut down, anyhow.)
Your only option is to either buy a paperback or pirate and downloading on kindle and then finding a PDF and then printing it should not happen to a paying customer.
I prefer audiobooks, but I have a large collection of them which which will be mine forever, no matter what any retailers decide.
Google Play audiobooks are also DRM-Free, but tend to be more expensive.
I do also occasionally buy from Audible, when a book isn't available anywhere else. You can strip the DRM with ffmpeg once you know the key for your account. But most audiobooks can be had natively DRM-Free if you shop around a bit.
But for those that are, Calibre keeps those nicely organized.
I do worry about things like Steam though, which unless the game is available DRM-free from GOG, may be the only place you can buy the game-- or at least no different in terms of DRM lock in and risk of the platform shutting down than other platforms like Epic or Origin etc.
Actually, many of publishers selling directly not only sell DRM free, but you get a variety of formats when you purchase, rather than purchasing separately by format.
Specifically, it says "you do not own any Virtual Items that you obtained through our Services, regardless of whether you “earned” those Virtual Items or “purchased” them. Your Account and any related Virtual Items are owned by Zynga. Zynga gives you a limited license and right to use your Account and the related Virtual Items while we offer the Services."
In spirit, it's similar: "We sold you a thing, but it's not really yours." Eventually, that changed, presumably because people resented not actually owning the things that they reasonably believe they owned.
It'll be interesting to see how this evolves. This is clearly different, in that "purchased" items only really exist on the Zynga servers; the burdens fall differently. But in the coming decades I wouldn't be surprised to see some consumer protection laws around virtual purchases.
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.
One day the game crashed, and the repair guy stuck a new hard drive in the game, and I lost all my characters. :(
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.
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.
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.
> Adult hobbies are expensive. Depends on what you value.
> $2,000 spent across 4 years which gave me thousands of hours of enjoyment really isn't that expensive. You spent the money, so you saw the value in it. I'd say it was a complete waste. For you, it's clearly not.
Value is relative, that's my point.
Cable TV costs $80/month, or about $1000/year.
So if you didn’t pay for Cable TV, then I would say that you saved money here.
Similar with mobile games, when I notice I'm spending a hour a day in a mobile game for weeks in and out, It's OK to spend 10€ on the gem package to make the game more fun.
A way of supporting their hobby, especially when their dollar/hour of entertainment is so high.
There's so much discussion from people who do NOT spend a dollar in any game, and how those that do need to be protected from themselves
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
"Up to 50% of revenue comes from 0.15% (15 in 10,000) of players"
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.
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.
Kind of easy if it makes you tons of money.
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.
"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."
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.
Haha, yes, but not for the good of their customers.
It was optimized for addiction and peer pressure.
Class act.
The crappy shovelware games live on though! Seems to be a resilient style of software, moving from platform to platform like a virus lol
https://www.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-s...
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 ?
Used to be the Windows 7 one (and I guess the WinXP one before that?), now it's a browser-based version…
I wonder if they considered a kickstarter or similar, to gauge the interest of their users to finance the porting.
Everyone I talked to while I was doing the work told me that the money was excellent but they hated working there.
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.
I mean you do that in Minecraft too haha.
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.
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.
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.
Yearly revenue around $1 billion.