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End of an era: ‘FarmVille’ is finally shutting down

As Adobe Flash Player bites the dust, FarmVille will be coming to an end on 31 December this year. But its spirit lives on.

It’s the end of an era and a fitting finish to the decade. Although shunned by a portion of the gaming community, FarmVille has lived longer than any of us expected.

The god of microtransactions and the harbinger of annoying notifications: this is our salute to FarmVille‘s 11-year Facebook legacy.

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To be fair, the game isn’t exactly ending on its own terms. The Adobe Flash Player it relies on will terminate at the end of the year (to be replaced by HTML5) so, along with similar social games on Facebook, it will be forced to shut down.

Social gaming on Facebook has become a phenomenon over the last decade, with 20 percent of all Facebook users making up the initial FarmVille playerbase. The game was so popular it amassed billions of dollars in profit. Although this popularity has become a thing of the past, FarmVille was a title everyone had heard of.

With its limited game mechanics and reliance on microtransactions for progression, many players shied away from this tedious game – there was never too much to do aside from repetitive chores. However the game’s successor, FarmVille 2, is still alive on mobile devices (just in case you want to grow some carrots out of nostalgia).

FarmVille 2: Country Escape and FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape can still be played on iOs and Android, with FarmVille 3 in the works. As if its death on Facebook were merely a setback, this franchise will persistently live on in spirit – and on the phones of our older relatives.