Farmville 2 launches but does anyone care? I mean, I do, a little, thus the memo item here, but in a larger sense, you know?
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Farmville 2 launches but does anyone care? I mean, I do, a little, thus the memo item here, but in a larger sense, you know?
Way back when we started doing Tech Report and dinosaurs roamed the earth and the internet was steam-powered, Zynga was a big success story. This was thanks in large part to Farmville, the hyper-addictive, hyper-social game that had millions of people studiously maintaining farms of pretend crops and make-believe livestock. Then things went South: follow-up games from Zynga didn’t make quite the splash and people realized that the games were pretty stupid (a fact that they could have arguably deduced much earlier in the process.
Now Zynga’s offering up Farmville 2 and there’s a degree of poetic sadness in the scenario being presented.
From the LA Times:
While the harvesting theme remains, there are no coins that come bursting out of every click in “FarmVille 2.” The original game’s two-dimensional artwork yields to three-dimensional graphics in the second version. Quests in the new game are less about rescuing lonely livestock and more about building an empire out of the wreckage of a neglected family farm.
“See, the farm represents the ruinous state of our company after lots of layoffs and people realizing our games are lousy!” a spokesperson for Zynga didn’t really say.
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