Farmville is Finally Shutting Down

After 11 long years and a brief period of being the most popular game in the world, Zynga is finally taking the Facebook game Farmville out to pasture.

From an announcement on the Zynga Support page:

Following an incredible 11 years since its initial launch back in 2009, we are officially announcing the closure of the original FarmVille game on Facebook. As previously stated, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player for all web browsers, and Facebook will stop supporting Flash games on the platform completely after December 31st, 2020. FarmVille will therefore be directly affected as a result of this.

We’re aware that many of you have been with us since the very beginning, helping to build an incredible global community of players over the years who’ve enjoyed this game just as much as we have. For that we say thank you.

In advance of sunsetting the game, we would like to point out that in-app purchases will be available up until November 17, at which point the game’s payment system will be completely turned off. Thereafter the game will not be accepting any in-app payments and any refunds will not be processed during this time. FarmVille will, however, continue to be playable until December 31st, 2020, at which point it will be shut down completely.

So yeah, this isn't a case of Zynga realizing they've had a good run and deciding it's time to call it quits: their hand is being forced by Adobe's shutdown of Flash and deciding that the old game simply isn't worth preserving anymore.

Characteristically, however, you can still buy stuff in the game until incredibly close to the game's eventual shutdown, and once you hit that mark any refunds that might be ongoing will be canceled. Glad they could stay true to themselves in these twilight years.

Still, there's no reason to cry, as Zynga themselves pointed out:

We look forward to you joining us in Farmville 2: Tropic Escape, Farmville 2: Country Escape and the upcoming worldwide launch of FarmVille 3 on mobile.

Yep, that sounds about right.