The original FarmVille, the Flash game on Facebook, closed on December 31, 2020. It was not shut for lack of players. It was shut because Adobe Flash Player reached end of life on the same date, and a Flash game cannot outlive Flash. Zynga announced the closure in 2020 and stopped taking in game purchases on November 17, 2020. That is one FarmVille out of at least five, which is why so many accounts of this contradict each other. The mobile spin offs were separate products on separate schedules, and one sequel was still running when we checked on September 7, 2026.
Which FarmVille Are You Asking About?
This is the table that fixes the confusion. Every row is a different product.
| Version | Platform | Started | Status, checked September 7, 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| FarmVille (the original) | Facebook, Adobe Flash | June 19, 2009 | Closed December 31, 2020 |
| FarmVille 2 | Facebook, Flash | 2012 | Gone. We could not source an exact final date, so none is printed here |
| FarmVille 2: Country Escape | iOS and Android | 2014 | Was still listed as an active Zynga title |
| FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape | iOS and Android | 2016 | Was still listed as an active Zynga title |
| FarmVille 3 | Mobile, plus a Facebook web version | Worldwide launch November 2021 | Running. The Facebook web version is affected by Meta’s Canvas sunset |
Any article that answers “what happened to FarmVille” with a single date has merged at least two of these.
How Big It Actually Was
The scale is the part people misremember downward, not upward.
FarmVille launched on Facebook on June 19, 2009. It reached a million daily active users in its first week. By August 2009 it was the first game on Facebook to pass 10 million daily active users.
Its peak, according to PocketGamer.biz’s account of the game’s rise, came in March 2010 at 83.7 million monthly active users and 34.5 million daily active users. Facebook itself had around 400 million users at that point. That means roughly one in five Facebook accounts touched FarmVille in a month.
Then it fell, and the reason is specific. Facebook changed how much application activity could reach the feed and how many notifications an app could push, which cut off the growth channel the game had been built on. Monthly users were down to around 60 million by the end of 2010. In December 2010 Zynga’s own CityVille passed it, with more than 61 million monthly and over 16 million daily users.
So FarmVille’s decline began in 2010, a full decade before it closed. The shutdown in 2020 was a technical deadline arriving at a game that had already been small for years.
The Actual Cause of Death Was Adobe
This is the mechanism, and it is worth stating plainly because it explains a whole cluster of shutdowns.
Adobe announced in July 2017 that Flash Player would reach end of life on December 31, 2020. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all committed to removing Flash from their products around that deadline. Adobe then blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player from January 12, 2021.
FarmVille was a Flash application. There was no version of it that could keep running in a browser after that date without being rebuilt from scratch, and Zynga chose not to rebuild an eleven year old game with a fraction of its former audience.
Zynga announced the closure in 2020 and gave players a wind down: in game purchases stopped on November 17, 2020, and the game itself went off on December 31, 2020. Coverage at the time from Game Developer, CBR, Screen Rant and others all put the date in the same place.
This is why late 2020 is crowded with endings. If you see a browser game from the social era with a December 2020 closure, Flash is almost certainly the reason, not a collapse in players. The same deadline ran through a long list of titles, and it is one of the recurring mechanisms in our guide to the platforms that shaped the internet and then vanished.
What Zynga Did Before and After
FarmVille’s ending was not Zynga’s first mass closure, and it was not the company’s last change of shape.
On December 30, 2012, Zynga shut PetVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars 2 and several other titles in a single cost cutting round, reported that day by TechCrunch and NBC News. That is eight years before the FarmVille shutdown, and it is the better indicator of where the social game business was heading.
Zynga itself was then acquired. Take-Two Interactive completed its combination with Zynga on May 23, 2022, in a deal the company valued at $12.7 billion, announced through Take-Two’s own investor relations release. That is the ownership answer for every surviving FarmVille title: they belong to the publisher of Grand Theft Auto now.
The pattern of a mobile studio being absorbed by a larger publisher after its peak is the same one that ended Rovio’s independence, which we cover in what happened to Angry Birds. In both cases the games kept running and the company that made them stopped existing as an independent business.
The Part Almost Nobody Covers: Facebook Is Ending Web Games Entirely
Here is the current development that changes the answer to this question again, and it is not in most of the pages ranking for it.
Meta announced in 2025 that Facebook Web Games, the Canvas platform that hosted browser games on facebook.com since 2007, will sunset on September 30, 2026. Developers were required to move to a new permissions model, and multiple studios including Zynga published notices to their players about the closure.
What that means in practice:
- It affects people who play on the Facebook website. Mobile apps and games’ own websites are not affected by this particular change.
- FarmVille 3’s Facebook web version falls inside it. The mobile version does not.
- The original FarmVille was already gone six years earlier, so this is not a second FarmVille shutdown. It is the end of the surface FarmVille was born on.
Put those two dates together and the arc closes neatly. FarmVille launched on Facebook’s web game platform in June 2009, the runtime it used died at the end of 2020, and the platform itself is scheduled to end on September 30, 2026.
Why FarmVille Worked, Since Nobody Explains This Either
FarmVille was mocked constantly and understood rarely. Three design decisions did the work.
It ran on a clock, not on skill. Crops matured after a real world interval and withered if you were late. That converted a game into an appointment, and appointments are far stickier than challenges.
Progress required other people. Neighbors, gifts and requests were not decoration. They were the mechanism by which the game grew, because every request was a message into somebody else’s feed.
It had no losing. There was no fail state, only slower progress. That opened it to an audience that had never considered themselves players, and it is the reason the demographic was so much older and more female than the games industry expected.
That third point is the durable one. FarmVille proved a market existed, and almost every casual mobile game since has been built on the finding.
The growth channel, though, was rented. FarmVille scaled because Facebook let application activity into people’s feeds, and it stopped scaling the moment Facebook narrowed that. Earlier social networks never built an app platform with anything like that reach, which is one of the structural differences between Facebook and the network it replaced, covered in what happened to MySpace. Later challengers could not offer developers that distribution either, which is part of why so few of them held onto anyone, as we set out in the failed Facebook alternatives.
What We Could Not Source
Stated openly, because this is a subject where confident wrong dates are the norm.
FarmVille 2 on Facebook. It was also a Flash game and it is no longer playable, but we could not find a Zynga announcement or a dated report from a named publication giving its final day. This page therefore prints no closure date for it.
Exact current store availability for the mobile titles. Country Escape and Tropic Escape were listed as active Zynga titles when we checked, but we did not verify a live store listing in every region, and regional availability differs.
Lifetime revenue. Figures circulate for what FarmVille earned. We found none traceable to a Zynga filing that isolates FarmVille from the rest of the catalog, so we quote none.
FAQ
When did FarmVille shut down?
The original FarmVille on Facebook closed on December 31, 2020. In game purchases had already stopped on November 17, 2020. Later FarmVille titles are separate products with separate dates.
Why did FarmVille shut down?
Because Adobe Flash Player reached end of life on December 31, 2020, a date Adobe announced in July 2017. FarmVille was built in Flash, so it could not continue in a browser without being rebuilt. Zynga chose to end it rather than rebuild it.
Can I still play FarmVille?
Not the original. FarmVille 3 was running when we checked on September 7, 2026, along with the FarmVille 2 mobile spin offs Country Escape and Tropic Escape. Those are different games, not the 2009 one.
Who owns FarmVille now?
Take-Two Interactive, which completed its acquisition of Zynga on May 23, 2022 in a deal valued at $12.7 billion.
How popular was FarmVille at its peak?
At its March 2010 peak it had 83.7 million monthly active users and 34.5 million daily active users, according to PocketGamer.biz. It had been the first Facebook game to reach 10 million daily active users, in August 2009.
Is Facebook shutting down games again?
Meta announced in 2025 that Facebook Web Games, the browser game platform known as Canvas, will sunset on September 30, 2026. It affects games played on the Facebook website. Mobile versions of those games are not affected by that change.
The Short Version
- Launched June 19, 2009. First Facebook game to 10 million daily users, by August 2009.
- Peaked in March 2010 at 83.7 million monthly and 34.5 million daily users, then fell as Facebook narrowed app notifications.
- Closed December 31, 2020, because Adobe Flash reached end of life on that exact date. Purchases stopped November 17, 2020.
- The sequels are separate. Country Escape (2014), Tropic Escape (2016) and FarmVille 3 (2021) are mobile titles with their own timelines.
- Zynga is now part of Take-Two, since May 23, 2022.
- Facebook’s web game platform ends September 30, 2026. Checked September 7, 2026.
