FFacebook users of a certain age may remember a particularly forlorn farm animal that appeared in their feeds during the platform’s heyday. The lonely cow wandered around the pastures of FarmVille players with a scowl on its face and eyes glistening with tears. “It feels very sad and needs a new home,” read a caption accompanying the game, asking you to adopt the cow or message your friends for help. Ignore the cow’s plea and it would presumably be left friendless and without food. Message your friends about it and you’ll be accelerating the spread of one of the biggest online crazes of the 2010s.
Launched 15 years ago, FarmVille was a phenomenon. More than 18,000 players tried it on its first day, and by day four, there were already a million. At its peak in 2010, more than 80 million users logged in monthly to plant crops, care for animals and harvest produce in exchange for coins to spend on decorations. Celebrities They professed their obsessionMcDonald’s created a farm for a promotion, and long before artists were releasing music in Fortnite, Lady Gaga released new songs From their second album to the cartoonish farming simulator. Not bad for a game that was put together in five weeks.
By 2009, developer Zynga had already established itself as a pioneer in social gaming when four friends at the University of Illinois pitched their plans for a farming simulator. It was a hasty reimagining of a failed browser game they’d created to mimic The Sims, but Zynga was impressed enough to buy the technology, hire the quartet, and pair them with some in-house developers. Zynga quickly launched FarmVille.
“Facebook was booming in popularity and engagement in a way that was novel at the time,” says Jon Tien, a former chief product officer at Zynga. FarmTown, an earlier farming sim from a different studio that had a similar cartoonish look and design, had already hit 1 million daily active users on the platform. And while Facebook had half-heartedly courted game studios before, it told Zynga it would soon grant outside developers access to user data, friends lists and newsfeeds.
“They opened up their platform to app developers like Zynga in such a way that we were able to create a basically symbiotic relationship,” says Tien. “Facebook gave Zynga access to a large, engaged audience, while Zynga gave Facebook users more things to do on the platform.”
Features like the Lone Cow, which allowed players to nudge friends to grow their farm, became central to the experience, flooding Facebook with posts and notifications promoting FarmVille to the masses. That viral mechanic turned the game “into a meme-like conversation piece,” says former Zynga vice president and general manager Roy Sehgal. “That water cooler effect made you want to participate because you saw your friends playing.”
And once you got in, it was hard to get out. For every crop you planted, you had to come back at a certain time hours later to harvest it. If you left it unattended for too long, it would wither and die. “The idea is that the player creates a date for themselves,” says FarmVille co-creator and lead developer Amitt Mahajan. “That ends up being the reason people come back every day.”
As a result, Tien says, the game became a commitment that players felt they had to fulfill. “We all make longer and longer lists of things we have to do and struggle to complete them in the time we would like,” he says. “Crossing things off the list is viscerally satisfying, and playing FarmVille was a way for people to lean 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 in-house data analytics tool, ZTrack. Able to monitor the most granular actions of players—from which features they used to how much time they spent using them to where they clicked on the screen—its goal was to create a complete, ever-evolving, data-driven picture of players’ interests.
“We had hundreds, if not thousands, of dashboards and experiments running at any given time,” Tien says. “We could look at any core metric in five-minute segments. We could see if new feature releases were having an effective impact immediately after the release.”
Today, metrics-driven design is the norm across social media platforms, apps, online stores and digital services. The belief in big data to predict consumer behavior has been the foundation of everything from Google’s advertising empire to Cambridge Analytica’s political consultancy. But in 2009, no one was doing it like FarmVille.
“Zynga’s approach to game analytics inspired the entire digital analytics industry,” says Jeffrey Wang, co-founder and chief architect of Amplitude, an analytics platform. “Amplitude’s early customers were former Zynga product managers who had started their own companies and were looking for tools comparable to ZTrack. At the time, there was nothing else like it.”
ZTrack became the backbone of FarmVille. Features were repeatedly tested, analyzed, and optimized, with the results determining what would be implemented, its monetization options, and how they would be integrated to maximize player retention.
“Zynga’s dirty little secret is that of the five corporate values, none is more important than metrics,” said Zynga’s co-founder. Trader Andrew he said in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania. Zynga’s former vice president of growth, analytics and platform technologies, Ken Rudin, went further when he said He was cited in 2010: “(Zynga is) an analytics company disguised as a gaming company.”
Like most Facebook apps at the time, users could only play FarmVille if they gave Zynga permission to collect their personal data from Facebook. But the details of exactly what data would be shared were relegated to the fine print on a screen that most users routinely ignored. “We didn’t really know, as the general public, and certainly government policymakers didn’t really know, the extent of[online data collection],” says Florence Chee, an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Communication. But, she says, we’ve since seen “the potential harms that result from unfettered data mining.” Zynga It was found in 2010 share your personal data with online advertisers and data brokers.
The success that came with FarmVille’s data-driven design didn’t last long. Players abandoned the game in the following years, Zynga turned its attention to a less popular sequel, and Facebook eventually revoked the developer access the game had relied on for its initial virality. When Adobe stopped supporting Flash, the software FarmVille was built on, in 2020, the company’s developer, Zynga, decided to stop using the software. The game was unceremoniously disconnected.
But more successes were to come for Zynga: Words with friendsmobile racing game CSR Racing, Draw Something and a host of slot games, all using player data to maximise engagement. Zynga continues to create data-driven and aggressively monetised mobile games, 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 a product of its time. “Fast forward to today, we don’t have anywhere near the same social phenomenon on Facebook as we did in 2009,” he says. “It was a very unique time for a game like FarmVille to come out, where the recommendation systems and algorithms were in the right place.”
