FAcebook users of a certain age may remember a particularly poor farm animal appearing in their feeds during the platform’s peak. The lone cow would wander the pastures of FarmVille players with her face twisted in a frenzy and her eyes glistening with tears. “She feels very sad and needs a new home,” read an accompanying caption, asking you to adopt the cow or send your friends for help. Ignore the cow’s plea and you would apparently be friendless and without food. Text your friends about this and you’ll be accelerating the spread of one of the biggest internet crazes of the 2010s.
Released 15 years ago, FarmVille was nothing short of a phenomenon. More than 18,000 players dropped the game on the first day, growing to 1 million on the fourth. At its peak in 2010, more than 80 million users signed up every month to plant crops, tend animals, and harvest goods for coins to spend on decorations. Celebrities expressed their obsession, McDonald’s created a farm for a promotion, and long before artists released music on Fortnite, Lady Gaga debuted songs from her second album via sim farm cartoons. Not bad for a game that was thrown together in five weeks.
By 2009, developer Zynga had already established itself as a forerunner of social media gaming when four friends from the University of Illinois presented their plans for an agricultural sim card. It was a rushed reimagining of a failed browser game they had made to apeanize The Sims, but Zynga was impressed enough to buy the tech, hire the foursome, and pair them with some in-house developers. Zynga pushed FarmVille out the door quickly.
“Facebook was exploding in popularity and engagement in a way that was new at the time,” says former Zynga product director Jon Tien. FarmTown – an earlier farm sim from another studio that had a similar cartoony look and design – had already reached 1 million daily active users on the platform. And while Facebook previously half-heartedly appealed to game studios, it told Zynga it would soon give third-party developers access to user data, friend lists and news feeds.
“They opened up their platform to app developers like Zynga in such a way that we could create a largely symbiotic relationship,” Tien says. “Facebook gave Zynga access to a large, engaged audience, while Zynga gave Facebook users more to do on the platform.”
Features such as the lone cow, which allows players to push their friends with requests to grow their farm, became central to the experience, flooding Facebook with posts and announcements advertising FarmVille to the masses. Such viral mechanics turned the game “into a meme-like topic of conversation,” says Zynga’s former vice president and general manager Roy Sehgal. “That water chill effect made you want to join in because you saw your friends playing.”
And once you got in, it was hard to get out. For each crop you planted, you will need to return at a certain time a few hours later to harvest it. If left unattended for too long, it would wither and die. “The idea is that the player is creating an encounter for themselves,” says FarmVille co-creator and lead developer Amitt Mahajan. “That ends up being why people come back every day.”
As a result, Tien says, the game became a commitment that players felt they had to do well. “We all make ever-growing lists of things we need to do and struggle to complete them in the time we’d like,” he says. “Checking things off your bucket list is incredibly satisfying, and playing FarmVille was a way for people to tap into that.”
New features and content were added several times a week to keep players engaged, but the real magic happened behind the scenes with Zynga’s internal data analysis tool, ZTrack. Capable of monitoring the most detailed player actions – from the features they used, how long they spent using them, to where they clicked on the screen – it was meant to create a total, ever-evolving picture driven by player interest data.
“We had hundreds, if not thousands, of charts and experiments running at any given time,” says Tien. “We could see every core metric in five-minute slices. We can see if new feature releases were impactful immediately after release.”
Metrics-based design is standard today in social media platforms, apps, online retailers and digital services. Reliance on big data to predict consumer behavior has underpinned everything from Google’s advertising empire to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. But back in 2009, no one was doing it like FarmVille.
“Zynga’s approach to analytics for their games inspired the entire digital analytics industry,” says Jeffrey Wang, co-founder and chief architect at Amplitude, an analytics platform. “Amplitude’s earliest customers were former Zynga product managers who started their own companies and were looking for tools comparable to ZTrack. At the time, there was nothing even close.”
ZTrack became the backbone of FarmVille. Features will be tested, analyzed and optimized iteratively, with the results determining what will be distributed, their monetization options and how they will be integrated to maximize player retention.
“Zynga’s dirty little secret is that, of the five corporate values, none is more important than metrics,” Zynga co-founder Andrew Trader said in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania. Former Zynga vice president of growth, analytics and platform technologies Ken Rudin went one further when he was quoted in 2010: “[Zynga is] an analytics company masquerading as a gaming company.”
As with most Facebook apps at the time, users could only play FarmVille by giving Zynga permission to collect their personal Facebook data. But the details of exactly what data would be shared were relegated to the fine print of a click screen that most users would typically ignore. “We didn’t really know it as a public, and certainly government policy makers didn’t really know the extent of it [online data harvesting],” says Florence Chee, associate professor of the School of Communication at Loyola University Chicago. But, she says, we’ve since seen the potential harm that comes from unfettered data mining. Zynga was discovered in 2010 to be sharing its players’ personal data with advertisers and online data brokers.
The success bought by Farmville’s data-driven design didn’t last long. Players drifted away from the game in the years that followed, Zynga turned its attention to a less popular sequel, and Facebook eventually revoked the developer access the game had relied on for its early virality. When Adobe stopped supporting Flash, the software on which FarmVille was built, in 2020, the game was pointlessly taken offline.
But more Zynga successes would follow: Words with Friends, mobile racing games CSR Racing, Draw Something, and a suite of slot games, all using player data to maximize engagement. Zynga is still making data-driven, aggressively monetized games for phones under the umbrella of Take-Two Interactive, which bought the company for $12.7bn (£9.4bn) in 2022.
For Chee, FarmVille was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s dream — and definitely a product of its time. “If you go forward today, we don’t have nearly the same social phenomenon happening with Facebook as we did in 2009,” she says. “It was a very special time for a game like FarmVille to come out, where the recommender systems and algorithms were in place.”