The games everyone played in the 2010s did not all end the same way, and that is the part every list of them gets wrong. Five different things happened. Some were switched off when the technology underneath them was retired. Some were bought and quietly shut. One was withdrawn by the person who made it. Several are still running under owners who did not exist when the game launched. And a large group is technically still available while being a completely different product from the one you remember. Sorting them by what actually happened is more useful than ranking them, so that is what this page does.
The Five Ways a Game From That Decade Ended
Every title below fits one of these. The category tells you far more than a release date does, because it tells you whether the thing you remember still exists in any form.
| Ending | What it means | Clearest example |
|---|---|---|
| The platform died underneath it | The game worked, the technology it ran on was retired | The original FarmVille, closed December 31, 2020 |
| Acquired, then switched off | Someone bought it at the peak and closed it later | Draw Something’s maker, OMGPOP, bought by Zynga in March 2012 |
| Withdrawn by its own maker | Still functional, deliberately removed from sale | Flappy Bird, taken down February 10, 2014 |
| Replaced by a successor that also failed | Two shutdowns, not one | Club Penguin in 2017, Club Penguin Island in 2018 |
| Still running, unrecognizable | Same name, different owner, different business model | Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Words With Friends |
When the Platform Dies, Everything on It Dies With It
This is the largest single cause and the least understood one.
Adobe announced in July 2017 that Flash Player would reach end of life on December 31, 2020. Adobe then blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player from January 12, 2021. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all disabled Flash in their own products around the same deadline.
That one decision ended an entire category. Almost every browser game your family played on Facebook between 2009 and 2015 was a Flash application. Zynga confirmed in 2020 that the original FarmVille would close on December 31, 2020 because of it, with in game purchases stopping on November 17, 2020. Nothing about the game had broken. The runtime it needed simply stopped existing.
The Flash deadline is also why so many shutdown dates cluster in late 2020. If you see a browser game with a December 2020 ending, the cause is almost always this and not a collapse in players.
Acquired at the Peak, Then Quietly Closed
Draw Something is the sharpest example in the decade, because the whole arc took about eighteen months.
The game hit roughly 35 million downloads in six weeks, and contemporaneous reporting put its revenue around $250,000 a day. Zynga acquired the developer, OMGPOP, in March 2012. TechCrunch and Forbes reported the price at about $210 million, understood as $180 million plus around $30 million in employee retention. Within a year the audience had collapsed. TechCrunch reported in August 2013 that the OMGPOP team had tried to buy their own site back and that Zynga closed it instead.
Zynga had done the same to a batch of its own titles earlier. On December 30, 2012 TechCrunch reported the shutdown of PetVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars 2 and several others in a single cost-cutting round.
The lesson is unglamorous and it holds across the whole cluster. A viral game is not a business, and the acquisition price at the peak is a bet on the curve continuing.
The One That Was Withdrawn on Purpose
Flappy Bird is the outlier that people remember most vividly, because nothing was broken and nobody bought it.
Its developer, Dong Nguyen, posted on February 8, 2014 that he would take the game down in twenty two hours. It was removed from the App Store and Google Play on February 10, 2014. He told Forbes in an interview published February 11, 2014 that the game had “become an addictive product,” that this was a problem, and that taking it down was how he intended to solve it.
The figures reported around that week, roughly $50,000 a day in advertising revenue and more than 50 million downloads, come from that reporting rather than from any filing. Treat them as widely repeated contemporaneous claims, not audited numbers.
Two Shutdowns Are Not One Shutdown
Club Penguin is where nostalgia articles most often contradict themselves, because there were two separate closures with two separate causes.
The original browser game, which Disney had acquired, was announced as closing on January 31, 2017 and shut on March 29, 2017. Its replacement, Club Penguin Island, was a mobile app rather than a browser world. Disney confirmed that it too was ending in late September 2018, and its servers were switched off on December 20, 2018.
So the answer to “when did Club Penguin close” depends entirely on which Club Penguin is meant. Any account giving a single date has merged two products.
FarmVille has the same trap in a different shape. The original Facebook game ended on December 31, 2020, while the mobile spin offs FarmVille 2: Country Escape and FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape continued past that date on entirely separate schedules.
Still Running, and Not the Same Game
The most common state for a 2010s hit is not death. It is continued existence under a different owner, with a different way of making money.
Activision Blizzard closed its $5.9 billion acquisition of King, the maker of Candy Crush Saga, on February 23, 2016, having announced it in November 2015. Take-Two Interactive completed its combination with Zynga on May 23, 2022, in a deal valued at $12.7 billion, which put Words With Friends and the FarmVille mobile titles under the company best known for Grand Theft Auto.
Angry Birds went through the same kind of transformation, from a paid app to a free to play catalog under new ownership, and we tell that story in full in our account of what happened to Angry Birds. The pattern there is the pattern everywhere in this group: the icon on your phone is the same, the thing behind it is not.
That is why “is it still available” is a bad question and “is it still the same game” is a good one.
What Ended Off the Phone Too
The decade’s living room hardware followed the same curve on a slower clock.
Motion gaming is the clearest case. The plastic peripheral era ran on the assumption that households would keep buying a new box for each new type of game, and it did not survive the moment phones became the default casual platform. Microsoft’s depth camera is the best documented ending in that category, and we cover it separately in what happened to Kinect.
The same shelf held the plastic guitars, the balance boards and the dance mats. All of them were sold on the promise of a peripheral that would be used for years and a catalog that would keep growing. In practice the catalog was expensive to license, the peripheral was expensive to store, and the audience moved.
The Apps That Were Not Games, and Went the Same Way
The line between a game and an app was thin for most of the decade, and the endings rhyme.
Video apps in particular were built on the same fragile economics: enormous reach, almost no direct revenue, and an owner who had bought them for a different reason. The most studied case is the six second video app, which is why we treat its closure at length in what happened to Vine, and it belongs on the same shelf as Draw Something rather than on a separate one.
The social layer under all of it moved too. Games spread in the early 2010s because Facebook let them into people’s feeds, and when that stopped being true the discovery engine for an entire genre disappeared. That mechanism, and the platforms it took down with it, is the subject of our guide to the platforms that shaped the internet and then vanished.
Even the biggest cultural moment of that era, the one that made a music video the internet’s shared reference point, ran through the same infrastructure. We look at how that worked in our piece on why Gangnam Style was so popular, and the answer has more to do with 2012’s platform mechanics than with the song.
The Honest Part: What You Can and Cannot Play Again
This is the section the ranked listicles skip, and it is the actual reason people search for this subject.
Server dependent games are genuinely gone. If a game needed to talk to a company’s servers, and those servers are off, no copy of the app on any device will work. Club Penguin, Club Penguin Island and the original FarmVille are in this group.
Runtime dependent games are gone in their original form. Flash games did not need a specific company’s servers so much as a runtime that no longer exists in any current browser. Some have been rehosted or reimplemented by preservation projects. That is a different thing from the original service running.
Delisted does not always mean dead. A game removed from a store can often still run from a copy already installed, if it does not require a login. Flappy Bird is the famous case: it was withdrawn from sale, not switched off.
Still on the store does not mean unchanged. A game that has changed owner, monetization and progression twice is a different product wearing an old name.
One deliberate omission, and we will state it rather than hide it. This page does not name, link or explain how to reach unofficial servers, clones or reuploads of any closed game. Some exist. They are not the official product, they are not covered by anyone’s terms, and directing readers to them is not what a history page is for.
FAQ
Why did so many games shut down at the end of 2020?
Adobe Flash Player reached end of life on December 31, 2020, after Adobe announced the date in July 2017, and Adobe blocked Flash content from running from January 12, 2021. Almost every browser based social game of that era was built in Flash, so the deadline ended a whole category at once rather than any one game failing.
What happened to Draw Something?
Zynga acquired its developer OMGPOP in March 2012, reported at around $210 million. The audience fell away quickly, and TechCrunch reported in August 2013 that Zynga had closed the OMGPOP site after the original team tried to buy it back.
Is Candy Crush still owned by King?
Yes, and King has itself been owned by Activision Blizzard since that acquisition closed on February 23, 2016 at $5.9 billion. King continued to operate as the developer.
Who owns FarmVille and Words With Friends now?
Take-Two Interactive, which completed its acquisition of Zynga on May 23, 2022 in a deal valued at $12.7 billion. The original Facebook FarmVille had already closed on December 31, 2020, before that deal.
Can I still play any of these?
It depends on which failure mode applies. Games that needed a company’s servers are gone for good. Games that were only delisted may still run from an installed copy. Games still on the stores are usually running, but often under new ownership and a different monetization model than the version you remember.
Which of these games actually made money?
Very few, relative to their fame. The reliable earners were the ones that lasted, notably the Candy Crush series and the long running word games. The viral hits with the biggest download spikes, Draw Something and Flappy Bird among them, either collapsed within a year or were removed by choice.
The Short Version
- Flash killed the browser era. End of life December 31, 2020, announced July 2017, content blocked from January 12, 2021.
- The original FarmVille closed December 31, 2020. Its mobile spin offs did not.
- Club Penguin closed twice. The browser world on March 29, 2017, Club Penguin Island on December 20, 2018.
- Flappy Bird was withdrawn, not shut down, on February 10, 2014, by its own developer.
- Draw Something’s maker sold for around $210 million in March 2012 and the site was closed by 2013.
- The survivors changed hands. King to Activision Blizzard on February 23, 2016. Zynga to Take-Two on May 23, 2022.
- Checked September 7, 2026.
