Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000168 · Gaming → Mobile games → Viral hits and collapses · 2009-2020
FarmVille
Facebook farming game that made billions from small daily tasks
Rejected. It isn’t going to the Arctic.
“FarmVille asked everyone on Facebook for help. This time no one could give it any.”
Why Noah said no
Mobile viral hits already holds Pokémon Go, Wordle and Among Us, all landmarks that can't leave, plus Flappy Bird. Even dropping Flappy Bird wouldn't free a slot, so FarmVille stays out and its withered crops go in the ledger.
- Rejected
- 28 Oct 2026
- Original size
- 27.5 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FarmVille
What it is
FarmVille was a free farming simulation game launched on Facebook in 2009 by Zynga, where players planted crops, raised animals and expanded their farms. Progress was slow without paying real money for Farm Cash, which let you speed things up. It peaked in 2010 with 83.7 million monthly players before collapsing after 2011 and shutting down in 2020.
Why it’s internet culture
It showed how social games could make money by getting people to spend small amounts repeatedly on convenience rather than entertainment, and how viral Facebook games could dominate culture for a moment then vanish almost entirely when the platform changed.
Tens of millions of people set alarms to harvest virtual crops on Facebook and spammed their friends with requests for help so they didn't have to pay real money. It made pay-to-skip-the-wait the normal way online games earned money.
What Noah read
FarmVille is a series of agriculture-simulation social network games developed and published by Zynga beginning in 2009. It is similar to Happy Farm and Farm Town. Its gameplay involves various aspects of farmland management, such as plowing land, planting, growing, and harvesting crops, harvesting trees and raising livestock. The sequels FarmVille 2 and FarmVille 3 were released in 2012 and 2021. The game was available as an Adobe Flash application via the social networking website Facebook and Microsoft's MSN Games. It was briefly available as a mobile app for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad in 2010. The game is free to play, but to progress quickly, players are encouraged to spend Farm Cash (in FarmVille) or Farm Bucks (in FarmVille 2), which are purchasable with real-world currency. FarmVille was thus one of the first major freemium games. After launching on Facebook in 2009, FarmVille became the most popular game on the site, and held that position for over two years. At its peak, in March 2010, the game had 83.76 million monthly active users. Daily active users peaked at 34.5 million. After 2011, the game's popularity declined considerably. By May 2012, it was ranked the sev…
The rest wasn’t kept.
History
Rejected
“Mobile viral hits already holds Pokémon Go, Wordle and Among Us, all landmarks that can't leave, plus Flappy Bird. Even dropping Flappy Bird wouldn't free a slot, so FarmVille stays out and its withered crops go in the ledger.”