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FarmVille, other top Facebook games seeing diminishing user base

by Griffin McElroy on Jun 6th 2010 5:30PM

Due to Facebook's recent decision to limit the notifications proliferated by third-party applications -- Join my Mafia! Feed my Goldfish! Become a Vampire! Fight my Pirates, etc. -- the creators of games which appear on the social networking site are beginning to see their player bases decrease dramatically. Gamasutra reports that 12 of the top 25 Facebook games saw more than one million players leave in May, while the worldwide FarmVille community lost more than 7.7 million of its agricultural inhabitants.

It's unclear how these losses affect the pocketbooks of social game developers such as Zynga -- its entirely possible that these quitters weren't purchasing in-game content in the first place. However, it's definitely creating some negative consequences for our untended, expansive soybean fields.

Source

Tags: facebook, farmville, pc, social-games, zynga

Reader Comments (77)

Look, while FarmVille isn't something that interests me (and I've never played it, hell, I barely even touch my Facebook profile), I don't get why so many people here are happy to see that happen.

Sure, you may not enjoy it, but did you ever realize that not everyone thinks like you? Did you ever think that there are people that do, in fact, enjoy FarmVille?

Just because you don't like something, everyone else has to hate it, too? That's how a sociopath thinks.

I'll tell you right now, i am happy because it was something I was unwillingly reminded of on a daily basis, often several different games a day. Even though I hid the applications, and banned invites, people's latest achievements still would spam my needs feed, and the invites still keep coming. I could not figure out a way to hide that stuff, facebook actually had to make an update banning it.

haha, its weird to have people from highschool contacting ME. most of the time i think, uhh we never even had a conversation. you called me loser once. screw you. ignore.

all the girls from high school seem to be squirting out their second kid, with orange skin, and bleached blonde hair to match. nice to see their activities still consist of "partyin, drinkin, hangin out" still after all these years. Glad to see you were able to keep your job at the gas station too.

I had a nasty graduating class.. and college girls do it better. particularly when they are at MY college.

LOL, sounds like we went to similar schools...

I read that in the Chappelle Player Hater voice and it made the comment 100x more epic and true.

*points finger* HA HA!

And the age of mindless money-wasting flash games draws to a close...

Isn't the logical move for all of these games to just move to the smartphones? I mean some of those games sound more involved than the 30 games storm8 makes which are all basically all same game(world world etc..).

Hudson: Let's just bug out and call it even, OK? What are we talking about this for? Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

I'm kind of surprised that a decision like that would make people want to leave the game. I've played several of these online facebook games and hated the fact I spammed my friends newsfeeds asking for help, or look what I just did posts.

A decision like that would make me like the game more so, not less.
I would imagine anyways that games like Farmville have fairly large fluctuations in their player bases. Going by my own experience, one friend starts to play, then all their friends do, then everyone loses interest and stops playing.

see the issue is the performance of the game, i used to play it a lot but as my farm got bigger and they started adding so much more stuff the game would lag all the time and sometimes not even load

I started cutting back on my facebook games, anything that felt like work is now removed from my list. Leaving - uh - well, not a whole lot.

Well they've been there as far back as I can remember...which is about 2-3 days...so I guess I cant help you.

It's upsetting that full retail quality titles (and even discounted games) will likely never have the audience that half of these games have.

Full retail titles don't get this kind of audience because they're charging $60 a pop, and then charging extra for DLC.

Farmville was free to play, and then charged for DLC.

Be glad retail games don't follow this format (much).

I guess they don't realize that correlation does not imply causation.

For instance, Sony sold more PS3s this year. It clearly must be because the new models have a 120GB hard drive! Definitely not because, for the first time since the PS3's release, it's the same price as the good Xbox 360 model and only $100 more than the Wii.

Well I guess the question is what are they taking to mean "leave"? Less likely it's someone proactively asking to have their account removed, and more likely it's a drop in user activity or something similar.

My life is a hollow shell.

No, its a pitiful shell!

That's because you couldn't pick up ONE piece of garbage!

Hollow and pitiful are both better than blue.

I wonder if anyone knows what I'm talking about...

"You couldn't pick up ONE piece of garbage!" is what Picard is saying in that pic... He's holding up 2 fingers BTW, the bird flipping is photoshopped.

basically all this says is that spam actually works.

People saw that episode of South Park where it points out how lame and stupid Facebook and Farmville are, and they came to their senses and dropped out.

Thank you, Matt & Trey, for being the voice of reason once again.

I've been making a million aircraft on ROBLOX

let me have a look.
http://www.nds9.com/

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FarmVille, other top Facebook games seeing diminishing user base

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Posted: Jun 6th 2010 6:26PM BPMOmega XBL PSN Steam said

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