Café World

» see apps.facebook.com/cafeworld as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

café world shipped on facebook on 30 september 2009. zynga was already the biggest studio on the canvas at that point, farmville had come out three months earlier. the new game was the same loop with a restaurant theme, you cooked pixel dishes on a timer, you served them before they spoiled, you paid real money in café cash if you wanted to skip the wait.

this happened more in the us and philippines than where i was, but the growth curve was on every startup blog. eight million players inside the first week, ten million-plus daily actives at peak. for a while café world was the fastest-growing social game in history, which was a thing you said out loud in 2009 without irony. still. zynga stacked it on the same freemium loop as everything else in the catalog, and it converted well.

i was on facebook in 2009. i had a friends list and a wall and the same feed of café-world spam that everyone with a facebook account got that year. anyway, i never installed it. the culinary sim on a timer with a friends-list gift mechanic was a genre for a different tier of user, i was more likely to be on donanimhaber reading about the ati radeon than in a café gifting a virtual eggplant to my cousin.

still. the noise on the facebook feed was real. you did not have to install café world for it to be inside your online life. friend requests generated by the game, cookbook gifts, timed-cake help requests, the whole viral wall-post layer that zynga's whole 2009-2012 growth model was built on.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

still. café world was a single-screen flash canvas app. you owned one restaurant, you decorated it, you cooked meals in real-world time on stoves that took anywhere from a few minutes to a full day. really though, dishes that finished cooking sat on a serving counter and had to be picked up before they went cold, which meant the game rewarded frequent short check-ins throughout the day. this was the same play pattern farmville had trained into people, transposed onto a restaurant instead of a farm.

in those days. café cash was the premium currency. you bought it with real dollars and used it to skip cook timers or buy premium recipes. the freemium conversion rate was strong enough to make café world one of zynga's top three revenue sources for several years, well behind farmville but well ahead of the smaller villes.

~ the decline ~

this part happened more in the silicon valley business press than where i was. zynga went public in december 2011 at a ten dollar ipo price, everyone was buying and the stock cratered through 2012. facebook was changing the notification rules to suppress game spam, which broke the free viral install loop that had built every ville title. really though, the shift to mobile was pulling the casual audience toward candy crush and the king catalog, which zynga did not have a strong mobile answer to yet.

by 2013 café world was still profitable but slowly bleeding daily actives. still. the game had crossed four years, longer than most facebook titles ever reached. inside zynga the platform team was under pressure to consolidate the catalog. petville, fishville, mafia wars 2, seven other games had already been cut in the december 2012 shutdown wave. café world had survived that round.

~ the day it died ~

zynga announced the closure on 23 may 2014. the shutdown date was 22 july 2014. café world went out paired with coasterville, mark pincus by then had been replaced as ceo by don mattrick and the platform team was cutting deeper. this happened more in the business news than in any facebook feed by then. really though, the daily active count had drifted so far by 2014 that most players did not realize the game was still running when the shutdown was announced.

after the shutdown the app was removed from facebook, the flash canvas stopped loading, refunds went out for unspent café cash. there was no successor product. anyway, restaurant story from teamlava and diner dash had eaten the space on mobile by then and zynga was not going to try again in the category. the ten-million-daily-active peak from 2010 was already ancient history four years later.

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