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Games IT

It's Game Over For FarmVille, as Flash Also Buys the Farm (bloomberg.com) 110

Posted by msmash from the end-of-an-era dept.
The last day of the year was also the last day for FarmVille, one of the original addictive Facebook games. From a report: FarmVille, which allowed players to cultivate colorful cartoonish farms by tending crops and caring for livestock, had 30 million daily players at its peak. But game developer Zynga announced in September it would shut down the game on Dec. 31, a victim of Adobe's decision to stop distributing and updating its Flash Player for web browsers, which in turn led Facebook to announce an end to support for Flash games on its platform.
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It's Game Over For FarmVille, as Flash Also Buys the Farm More

It's Game Over For FarmVille, as Flash Also Buys the Farm

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  • Aww (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday January 01, 2021 @01:35AM (#60884114)

    Awww ..how sad .. it couldn't have happened to a better game :(

  • HTML 5 has been around for more than a decade and Flash has been dying for at least 5 years. FarmVille is only a decade old. Did these guys just go to a Flash boot camp then never retrained. If so they sure got sheâ(TM)ll of a return on investment.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      :-\

      They got what of a return on investment?

      • "sheâ(TM)ll". That's how much of a return they got. I'm not sure how that translates into Earth currencies, but it's about a bleevix.

    • They created Farmville 2 as a mobile app and Farmville 3 as an HTML 5 app. It was a good excuse to upgrade the graphics and cycle out a lot of old content. But it was definitely a business decision.

    • Flash died 10+ years ago when Steve Jobs arbitrarily killed it on ios. I was doing some flash stuff up until then which I now sometimes do in react, and I honestly believe that flash did it better.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fermion ( 181285 )
        Flash was critical to advertisers because it would run animated content without the users ability to stop it. Until flashblock. Which made it obsolete.

        And the security issues.

        HTML 5 also is critical to advertisers as it allow them to run animated content on users browsers without consent. However HTML 5 does not have the same security issues and has other uses.

        • Flash was critical to advertisers because it would run animated content without the users ability to stop it. Until flashblock. Which made it obsolete.

          And the security issues.

          HTML 5 also is critical to advertisers as it allow them to run animated content on users browsers without consent. However HTML 5 does not have the same security issues and has other uses.

          HTML 5 still allows annoying videos that people don't want. It's up to the user to figure out how to block them.

      • when Steve Jobs arbitrarily killed it on ios

        No, that isn't quite how that went. It wasn't possible to run it on iOS so he told everyone that you wouldn't want to anyway. In fact, he said it was banned.
        Please understand that it never existed on iOS in the first place, and its inability to run something that was quite popular was portrayed as a good thing.
        Ultimately killing flash is a good thing, since nobody wants to be stuck using propietary crap, if possible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      HTML 5 is not a good replacement for flash.
      It's a lot harder to write stuff for it, and it's not as easy to distribute.
      Of course, the culture that allowed things such as newgrounds to thrive is also dead thanks to the change facebook did, but removing the tool and replacing it with something worse don't help.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Ultra64 ( 318705 )

        "HTML 5 is not a good replacement for flash.
        It's a lot harder to write stuff for it, and it's not as easy to distribute."

        Oh, wow, no one told me today was opposite day.

        • Ten years ago, hell even in 2017, it was true. HTML5's canvas (even with 100% coverage) cannot do everything flash can graphically. And it was erratically supported. The OpenGL version isn't very easy to use to create 2D assets (like Flash primarily was) and frankly, it's 3D implementation seemed to lag even Flash's. It still might.

          Ease of distribution I assume is referring to how different some browsers parse code.

          Meanwhile, I still had Fortune 500 clients asking for Flash content in 2018 because they w

    • 100% of platforms supported Flash at the time of Farmville's release except for mobile platforms (which at the time had a barely functioning web browser). Even Apple hadn't formally announced they won't bring Flash to mobile at the time. No lifecycle announcements had been made and HTML5 was non-existent outside of a W3C publication, certainly it wasn't used anywhere.

      You have a very strange memory.

      Also they milked users of their crap little browser game for nearly 12 years. They got a fucking HUGE return on

      • 100% of platforms supported Flash at the time of Farmville's release except for mobile platforms

        I remember running flash on Android. It wasn't supported after a while, but it totally existed and was supported back in the timeframe you're talking about. Google killed it off in late 2012.

  • My wife found it incredibly addictive, at one point I was ready to sue Zynga for estrangement of affections.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    If only FarmVille had a virtual grave to piss on.

  • Thank you Steve Jobs (Score:4, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday January 01, 2021 @02:38AM (#60884178)

    He wasn't the only one to decry Flash, nor the first; but he certainly got the issue out there in the mainstream.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • He wasn't the only one to decry Flash, nor the first; but he certainly got the issue out there in the mainstream.

      Hating flash was mainstream long before Jobs had his say on it. It was so mainstream that by the time Jobs said anything a complete functional replacement in the form of HTML5 was already ratified. The world literally solved the Flash problem before Jobs even formed an opinion on it.

      • > The world literally solved the Flash problem before
        > Jobs even formed an opinion on it.

        Oh? That's funny. Because no flash on iOS started in 2007... before it was even called iOS, actually. I'm not sure when Steve Jobs first personally expressed his opinion on the matter, but his famous "Thoughts on Flash" letter was in 2010. Now, by my math, both 2007 and 2010 are came before 2020. And, I don't know about you, but not being a telepath who was in close enough contact to scan Jobs, I have no idea

        • Oh? That's funny. Because no flash on iOS started in 2007... before it was even called iOS

          So did no clipboard. Don't confuse iOS being an incomplete platform with Apple making a formal declaration on Flash. Steve Jobs made no formal mention of Flash support prior to 2012. The thoughts letter was just that, thoughts.

          Now, by my math, both 2007 and 2010 are came before 2020.

          That's cool. Who cares about 2020 since we're talking about 2009. Jobs said nothing before 2010 (by your own admission), nothing formal before 2012 on platform support, and when was HTML5 released? Oh that's right 2008.

          2008 So, given that the flash problem was literally... FINALLY...

    • Oh kid. Stop rewriting history.

      He ONLY did it, because Flash, like Java, would have allowed people to run whatever they liked on their own damn pocket computers, and it would not have been the locked-down walled garden appliance gadget that control freak Steve Jobs wanted.

      Nothing to do with anything else.

      Why do you think other browser engines are still not allowed on iDevices?

      • This. Jobs wasn't a pro-security crusader, he was a user-imprisoning gatekeeper.

      • Why do you think the decision was based on only one factor? Jobs listed multiple reasons. The three big ones were stability, power efficiency, and security. Power efficiency was going to be a much bigger problem on mobile but the other two were certainly headaches for desktop users. And if you are Apple how would you address your customer complaints that Flash could cause a large number of failures on iPhone and that was out of your control (other than to not allow it).
  • Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

  • What, js+opengl not good enough for farmville? (Score:3, Informative)

    by gTsiros ( 205624 ) on Friday January 01, 2021 @02:54AM (#60884198)

    Seriously, even my phone can run quake 3... in the browser but zynga could not port it to asmjs+opengl? It wasn't a surprise that flash was being phased out. They had all the time in the world. I suppose they made whatever money they cared for.

    • Re:What, js+opengl not good enough for farmville? (Score:5, Informative)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday January 01, 2021 @03:13AM (#60884212) Journal

      They made Farmville 2 and 3 that are html5 and mobile.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I think they had mobile apps as well.

      The article just states that the original Facebook flash-based game will be ending and users will either have to move to other games or to a different version.

      I really doubt there were many people using the original Flash version anyways.

    • I worked on a similar project in my last company, we made the decision to port the game to run without flash (Unity, WebGL). You face so many problems, and I get why Zynga made this decision. First of all, it's a tremendous amount of work. The code base for a game running for 10 years is huge. You'll have to basically pay for two teams, one maintaining the old game and adding content, and another team that catches up with the flash version. All while new content is being added. We're talking about years of

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      They already did. I expect though that somebody could write a general purpose flash emulator with a large subset of its functionality (perhaps lacking some protocols & codecs) using canvas/video/audio elements and webassembly if such a thing hasn't already been done. I'm not sure *why* someone would want to but perhaps there are legacy uses / software preservation reasons. Maybe now Flash is dead Adobe should drop the source code out there sans any licensed files and see what people do with it.

    • Why port when you can just re-write. Your complaint is like criticising Infinity Ward that you can't play the original Call Of Duty and are stuck playing one of the many sequels instead.

    • Why do you assume Zynga "could not" instead of "did not want". Developers cost money and if the current player base is no longer large enough to support the development cost, then it is purely a business decision.

  • Does anyone know where the archived players are or how to verify them? Because adobe used to have gigs of them up and removed them from the page when they EOLed Flash.

  • Hey "msmash", the link after the caption goes to the same Bloomberg article as the previous one, "NYSE To Delist Chinese Telco Giants on US Executive Order".
  • In my consulting years I worked with many companies where there is a guy who was an early or founding person. Or, if the company is old enough, has just been there longer than anyone else and through pure seniority is the arbiter of good taste when it comes to technology, coding styles, etc.

    The person does know the old tech through and through, but with this high level of job security and super specialization becomes and surrounds themselves with gatekeepers to make sure some new whipper-snapper doesn't c

    • Like the old guard isn't tasked with keeping the cruft running with minimal resources while the managers squeeze every last bit of profit out of it and then shut it down to replace it with something new in the name of the holy product life cycle. But of course the nerds get the blame. The bullying never ends.

    • I gather that you're still a young whippersnapper who falls for every latest tech fad like it's avocado toast. On the whole, this just leads to companies deciding to rewrite all of their existing (and working) code for the grand new paradigm, only to discover that this creates a new set of bugs and flaws and work-arounds. It's churn for the sake of churn, and only profits the folks promoting the new fad.

      • fad like it's avocado toast

        When I was a kid we called avocado toast an open faced sandwich. We paid less for it, too.

      • I gather you're a PHP hack. Hit close to the mark?

        • Let's me check my embedded code? Nope it's C.Let's check my ML; surprise it's Python. Let's check my server code. Nope it's C++ 17 migrating to C++ 20 in the next 6 months. Front end done in pretty cutting edge javascript using some webgl which may go WASM if that experiment works out.

          I did like PHP years ago as a web back end as it was certainly the best for that specific task. But the framework religious freaks took over PHP after I stopped having any use for it. Now I can't recommend against it strongl

    • I've seen you before (Score:5, Insightful)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Friday January 01, 2021 @12:32PM (#60884778) Journal

      I might have seen you before.

      I've seen the new guys come in and say we need to throw out 20 years of work, work that forms an industry-leading product, because "it's written with old tech". Old tech like that HTML you mentioned. Something they don't mention until they are asked is that they don't know the existing tech, and therefore don't know how to work with it. They only know how to make React stuff with a particular WYSIWYG. Everything else they want to rewrite in a new programming language, a language that is nearing it's 1.0 release. They're pretty confident that the language will develop to actually be functional by the time we need each language feature that doesn't yet exist. Here's one example:

      The new hires really wanted to play with AWS Lambda. Because it's new and highly scalable, they said. In every meeting, no matter the topic, their solution was always "rewrite it as a lamda". AWS Lambda is an interesting thing that could be useful for certain tasks but unfortunately the new crew couldn't quite understand what Lambda *is*, what kinds of tasks it's designed for. For those unfamiliar, AWS Lambda is a "function as a service". You write a function, maybe 6-24 lines of code, and that becomes a web service. It's useful for translating input in a given format to another format, something like PDF to text or Excel spreadsheet to csv. Any kind of input to output translation. The name Lambda comes from math, where a lambda is a true function which accepts exactly one argument and returns exact one value, something like square-root. AWS limits the number of seconds that a lambda can run and limits the input because a lambda is a function, not an application server.

      Their problem, they thought, was how many hacks they needed to use to get around the time and space limitations so they could run very large applications, hundreds of thousands of lines of code with multiple databases and a thousand inputs, as a lambda. Every meeting they' want to rewrite tens of thousands of lines as a lambda, and every meeting I'd shut them down insisting that they a) spend 10 minutes finding out what lambda is first and b) choose one of the 100 or so items from our to-do list, accomplish something that actually needs to be done, rather than throwing out perfectly working functionality and replacing it with a new buggy version.

      Eventually I got tired of the same thing over and over, so when they came saying we should throw out a particular software and rewrite it as a lampda I didn't say much. I did tell them it wasn't a good fit, I'd rather they tackle one of the to-do list items as a lambda so we'd actually be moving FORWARD, but I didn't totally shut them down. I did know that the functionality they intended to replace was tricky, probably a level or two above their ability to get it right.

      What they wanted to throw out and replace was some code that runs on patch Tuesday every month, parsing information about which patches cover which vulnerabilities. That's tricky only because of supersedence and the need for the output to be efficient. The June roll-up covers all of the vulnerabilities that were covered by May, which covers all the April ones, etc. This backward coverage isn't expressed in the monthly data fees because it would make the data feed thousands of times larger. Also, they wanted to do a couple other very similar services which get patch and vulnerability information from other sources once a month or once a week.

      Since I didn't shut them down, they got a meeting to present a quick summary their proposal to our boss's boss. I sat in and stayed quiet. That led to a meeting with the grand-grand-boss, the big guy. I sat quietly while they espoused the virtues of AWS Lambda for 15 minutes, mostly just saying "scalable" over and over. Lambda could do the job 5,000 times per minute!, they said. I silently chuckled to myself.

      At th end of their presentation, they asked if there are any questions. I had three short questions:

      Me: "This is to replace the Patch Tues

      • Executive summary: confessions of a cancer.

        • Let me guess. You are the gatekeeper for your company using wildly out of date technologies that you have declared as "proven" with things like C++ 17 being: unstable, unproven, and not well adopted by the C++ community; or at least that is what you tell upper management and they are too technically unsophisticated to call you on your BS.
      • "time-tested code" is exactly the mantra of the horrible people that I am talking about. This time tested code takes years to become proficient with because it is such a mess. It is surrounded by procedures such as writing documentation that literally nobody uses and no client has contractually demanded. SVN is the source code repository because it is "time tested" and part of the 800 step build system using 3 extinct technologies alone.

        From what you have described you are 20 years out of date, probably

        • > New features take super senior programmers

          Yes, it requires people who know how to actually develop code, not just press buttons in a shiny WYSIWYG.

          > It is surrounded by procedures such as writing documentation

          Oh I'm sure that *your* code has to be thrown out and rewritten every year or two since you don't document any of your design or any of your changes, so nobody knows how it's supposed to work. No argument there!

          We document https://httpd.apache.org/docs/... [apache.org] how it works, so when you need to add

      • The 'new guys', the 'new hires'? Kind of vague. Come out and say it. They were diversity hires weren't they?

        • Actually the new hires were simply newbies, less-experienced programmers. Cheap programmers.

          The "diversity hire" actually turned out to be quite good. I don't know that that had anything to do with my calling the boss out on illegal discrimination. When he said "I'm posting a new position and I'm going to hire a woman this time", I let him know what he had just said is actually illegal. I advised him that what he can do legally is advertise the position via channels that may make it visible to qualified wom

    • None of that really applies here. Instead of updating Farmville for HTML5, Zynga just moved to mobile for Farmville 2 and HTML5 for Farmville 3.

    • Now the RubyOnRails popularity has waned, Ruby programming has gone back to what it was before; mostly unix, and one of the biggest pluses is that it has a really-low-level, very simple C api. And the Ruby stdlib follows the conventions (and warts) of the C stdlib.

    • You totally nailed that right down to the details. This can only mean that you have seen both scenarios, one where the old cancer wins (supposedly, since they only succeeded in wrecking things which might also wreck their meal ticket in the long run) and another where the cancer was successfully forestalled. Personally, I have only directly witnessed the former, and that a number of times, always coupled with both sides losing in the end.

      • There is one other variation that I have seen a number of times. Cancer wins wins wins wins. Then gets outsourced. The outsourcing happens one of two ways. They just plain outsource (less common) they buy a company that made the very same product and then just retire the old product to maintenance along with its team.

        This only works if they can keep the old cancer from infiltrating the new company and then becoming its project/product/engineering managers.



        Personally, if I was hired to fix an old guar

  • I, for one, am mourning the loss of Flash as it means thousands of web games (not just Farmville) from the web's first couple decades will now become largely unplayable and potentially lost forever. Yet I haven't seen this huge loss decried once in the media, anywhere.

    The Internet Archive [archive.org] is trying to rectify the situation working with the Ruffle emulation project- although it's still far from full fidelity and the number of games the Archive has currently is but a tiny fraction of those that existed on the

    • Yet I haven't seen this huge loss decried once in the media, anywhere.

      That is because nothing of value was lost. And this is probably the one time this can legitimately be said without being funny.

      Not everything in history is worth preserving. In fact Flash should be archived on a single page with only the text "Please don't do this shit again!".

      • Uum, if you think nothing of value was ever implemented in Flash, you definitely have never seen Kongregate.

        Flash was just a simple authoring tool for animations. Nothing wrong with that per se. HTML5 is not much different from that. And if you think the vast majority of Flash content was useless crap, I recommend you try old 90s Geocities homepages written in HTML for comparison.

        It only died because 1. it was full of security holes, and 2. and most importantly, HTML5 webapps IS the new Flash.
        Now just wait

    • Look up Flashpoint:

      https://bluemaxima.org/flashpo... [bluemaxima.org]

    • You can also just use open source flash developer tools to play them locally.

  • So what is the long-term plan for preserving Flash-based games? While most people know Flash as a browser plug-in, there's actually a lot of engines that execute Flash. Lots of AAA games used it for their UI overlays, loading screens, etc. I can't remember the names though. Are those engines still around? Can they be used in a project like MAME?

    While writing this I found Flashpoint [bluemaxima.org] but I am not sure how far along they are or what Flash games it works with.

  • With everybody sitting around at home with nothing to do, what could be better than a game where you repeat the same mindless clicks over and over?

  • Thats one of the advantages of the ESR (and on Mac, to boot).

    Granted, by next ESR release (around Aug 2021), the NPAPI plumbing will be removed, and flash will stop working. But I get my 6 months of reprive while the WebSite Laggards get their act together.

    Another of the benefits of using the ESR...

    For what is worth, if you are a corporate, Adobe offloaded support for flash to Harman (a subsidiary of Samsung):
    https://services.harman.com/ [harman.com]

    This is standard fare in the industry. By the tail end of Symbian regin

  • A shitty one.

    Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation made me believe that, though I obviously never played either game.

  • If only Zynga had enough money to hire developers to port it to HTML5! Oh wait, they are or at least were the most valuable gaming company in the entire world. Well, GTA5 doesn't do shit to police their online environment and won't spend a penny on dedicated servers or anti-hack countermeasures. Is spiking your most lucrative product into the ground on purpose until it's dead some sort of industry trend or something?
    • You do know Zynga made 2 sequels of FarmVille that did not use Flash, right? In the end, Zynga made a business decision that spending development resources to port an older game was not worth it to them.
  • Oh no, I just hope the last guy logged in will water my crops!

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