Zynga FarmVille
And why I don’t play it anymore
When I discovered FarmVille in 2009 I was spellbound. Until mid 2010 I played FarmVille everyday more than a dozen times.
There was so much joy in it! The game taught me much about farming and equipments and even friendships because I made new ‘neighbor’ friends and also bonded with friends on Facebook who I hardly talked to otherwise.
I enjoyed playing video games as a kid, but I was never hardcore. Discovering FarmVille changed all that. We harvested our own virtual crops, exchanged gifts, chatted in the ‘marketplace’, visited each others farms and always always lent a helping hand to our neighbors, at all times.
It was such a great connection!
Zynga! Zynga!
And then they changed the game.
- They introduced TASKS: A few tasks now and then were okay, but having a list of ‘neverending’ tasks is tiresome! Can you imagine that you work so hard to complete a task only to have another one waiting. They should have given the player some rest! (I bet their engineers were coding all the while :P)
- They increased dependencies between neighbors: I had to have an x number of neighbors for a host of activities because ‘levelling up’ depended on it. Once upon a time it was fun to talk to your neighbor now and then, now it was total intrusion (just like in real life). Why Zynga?
- They stopped listening to thier customers: As a company they did fantastic, more than they probably imagined they would. They probably taught farming to a generation that was never going to bother learning, or have the oppurtunity to. But somewhere between making brilliant games, making so much money and having so many subscribers, they stopped listening to their core customers.
Zynga’s core customers were people who played FarmVille. I don’t think they ever understood that! Why Zynga? There were so many complaints and forums talking about it! What were you so busy doing?
Why did you not listen?
Listening=Learning
There were a bunch of other issues, which I shall write about it when I can. (Thats why they made the ‘edit’ option in Medium)
FarmVille began to suck, and Mafia Wars, Poker, CityVille etc. followed suite. (I have played all of them). I dragged myself to play FarmVille because of my prior memories attached to it. My friends did the same.
I waited six months and then a year, saw the new games, saw the same mistakes they were making over and over. I kept hoping they would learn from their mistakes.
They launched FarmVille 2.. and they repeated the same mistakes. There was no connection anymore! The link was lost, maybe forever!
Once upon a time I had 110 friends playing FarmVille actively, now just 2. I lost many of them neighbors, forever! Truth!
The last time I played FarmVille actively was 2011. I keep checking once in a while.. but I am always dissappointed.
I read somewhere a few days ago that Zynga has 15 million plus daily active users, which is a big number but I am sure they could have had a lot more.