It’s quite a wild ride for Farmville in Facebook flash games era, it is one of the reasons why some Friendster users in South East Asia including me eventually migrated to Facebook just to play this popular game.
The first franchise of Farmville by Zynga was initially released on June 19, 2009 on Facebook, it receives a sensational success among all teens in the social media platforms. Yesterday (June 19, 2020), was the 11th year of Farmville and this will be the last year you’ll be able to play the original game.
Starting December 31, 2020, the Adobe Flash Player will stops working on all web browsers. One of the affected apps are the 11-years old Farmville who uses Flash as their game engine.
UPDATE as of 09/27/2020: Zynga officially announced that Farmville will completely shutdown on December 31, 2020. While in-app purchase will be available until November 17, after that, the game will no longer accept any form of in-app payments and any refund will not be processed.
However, you can still enjoy Farmville on the new mobile version, the Farmville 2 which are available now on Google Play and App Store.
How to Play Farmville Original
For those who wants to reminisce the original Farmville game, you can still play the game from your web browser, you just have to install Adobe Flash Player and dig some settings to enable it. It works very well on Mozilla Firefox.
Open up the game at https://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm, you’ll then be asked to Run Adobe Flash. After that, you’re ready to enjoy and experience the original Farmville game.
You can also install Facebook Gameroom and immediately play the game from the app.
Flash End of Life on Facebook
On another news, last June 25, 2020, Facebook also made an announcement (https://www.facebook.com/fbgaminghome/blog/flash-end-of-life-approaching-options-for-developers) for all developers about the upcoming Flash end of life. Leaving developers with two options (1) to let Facebook know where players should be redirected before August 31, 2020; or (2) to update their game(s) to HTML5 before December 31, 2020.
However, it is also mentioned on one of the old article (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/gamesonfacebook/webtech/) from the developer tools regarding their Facebook Gameroom that it will continue to support flash games which has built-in Adobe Flash that is independently working from the web browser.
But since the recent news is conflicting with this old article, we are not sure if it also applies to Facebook Gameroom given that Adobe Flash is a security risk after this year. Simply because it will no longer receive an updates in case of future vulnerabilities and exploits.
Speculation – nobody knows what will happen after the end of the year. There is no news from Zynga where they reveal any plans. Flash will not be stopped as far as I know, it will only not be updated anymore. As Flash is risky like crazy already it doesn’t really matter.
I will never play another Zynga game.