Farmville: Case Study of a High-Success Facebook App

Farmville is a Facebook app that you may have caught wind of in the last two months.  It’s the one that releases notifications in Friend Feed about your friends finding lonely farm animals with what look like Bratz-style graphics.

Zynga, the company that created it (incidentally also the creator of MafiaWars), released stats last month that showed that its daily playership rivaled that of World of Warcraft, the biggest massively multiplayer game in the world (link).  Farmville launched in June and by August had 11 million daily Facebook users, attracting an average of a million users a week (link).  Currently the game has almost 50 million active monthly users.  Holy moly, that’s a lot of engaged users.

While Farmville isn’t a very innovative game in itself, it’s an interesting case study into what made it such a successful game app on Facebook, for both users and the creators.

• It appeals to the lowest common denominator — easy to use and inoffensive.
• It seems to be enjoyable to users who visit it several times a day or once every couple of days.
• It encourages involvement with your friends with lots of benefits to them and you, as opposed to some games or applications which would bother your friends with notifications, with the only benefit coming to your personal gameplay, not theirs.
• It involves minimal effort to create a Sim-like world where your friends’ worlds are right next to your own.
• It allows you to visit and observe your friends’ games, which can help with your own game strategy and creates a cooperative atmosphere by allowing you to help them at no loss to them, and gain to you.
• It always alerts the user before sending a notification to their Friend Feed, with the option for them to not have the alert show, which builds trust with the user.
• Oh yeah, and it’s really fun to play!

For the game creators, they have adopted an interesting strategy similar to what they did with Mafia Wars, where users have two separate options to increase their personal game cashflow outside of investing time in the game. They can either purchase credits outright through credit cards or Paypal, or participate in partnering advertising sponsorships like magazine trials and product sampling to earn their credits outside of the game.  Zynga seems to know what they’re doing… now, how long do you think an app or game like this can this stay successful?

This type of Facebook app would require more development than a typical app, but its immediate and exponential success is worth noting.

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