CastleVille

» see zynga.com/games/castleville as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in 2011 i was twenty-seven years old, working as a computer engineer in turkey, and the facebook games i saw in friends' feeds were mostly farmville and texas holdem with the occasional cafe world. castleville was not part of that picture. it was zynga's medieval-themed game, built out of the dallas studio that zynga had bought the year before, and it ran heaviest in the english-language facebook userbase where its irish-saxon-pirate-viking-princess castiing made cultural sense. it had real numbers in those markets, just not in mine.

the launch was in early november 2011. zynga had set up the dallas studio specifically to chase a different kind of social game, one with more depth than the farmville harvest loop. bill jackson was the creative director and gave interviews comparing the design goal to world of warcraft, which was an ambitious framing for a free flash game running inside a facebook canvas frame. the actual game shipped with a medieval village builder loop, customizable avatars, a roster of non-player characters that included peasants, pirates, princesses, and vikings, and a reputation system that pushed you to interact with neighbors to unlock new trades and rare items.

the launch numbers were huge. by november 21, 2011, three weeks in, the game was at five million daily active users. by the end of its first month it had crossed twenty-six and a half million total players and was ranked the number five game on facebook. it received one million facebook likes at launch, a metric that mattered in 2011 when virality through likes was still how facebook games grew. the gamezebo review gave it four and a half stars out of five and called the visual and audio experience among the best the platform had ever offered.

~ the dossier ~

~ what made it different ~

the audio was the unusual piece. castleville was the first social game to ship with a full orchestral and choir soundtrack, recorded by an actual orchestra rather than synthesized. that decision came out of bill jackson's framing that the game should feel deeper than its harvest-and-build loop suggested, and the soundtrack was the most expensive single content decision in the production budget. the music itself held up. years later, after the game shut down, recordings of the score still circulated on youtube as background music for completely unrelated content.

the art direction matched the audio choice. the buildings, the avatar customization options, the rare items in the trade-with-neighbors system, all of it aimed at a slightly higher production tier than the farmville-cityville-frontierville aesthetic. zynga was trying to demonstrate that the studio could push the genre upward, both as a defense against player burnout on the simpler loops and as a recruiting story for game-industry talent that might otherwise consider zynga embarrassing to work for.

~ the long tail ~

castleville stayed live for four and a half years, longer than several of its zynga siblings. it received a sequel called castleville legends on mobile in 2014, which had a separate life on ios and android until 2018 when zynga shut that down too. the original facebook version kept a smaller but real player base of regulars through 2013 and 2014. zynga did not push major new content after 2013 but kept the lights on while the daily active users slowly declined.

by 2015 the writing was on the wall for the whole zynga facebook-flash catalog. adobe had announced flash deprecation. browsers were preparing to drop the plugin entirely. zynga's earnings calls had moved focus to mobile word games and casino apps. on february 2016 the company announced a wave of sunsets that would close out the old facebook portfolio, with castleville on the list. the sunset date was april 30, 2016. the parallel with frontierville's same-day shutdown the year before was not a coincidence. zynga's accounting team had picked april 30 as a clean fiscal-quarter close date for that kind of property retirement.

~ what got buried with it ~

what closed with castleville was the production budget ceiling for the social-game category. the medieval-fantasy theme, the orchestral score, the bill-jackson-comparing-this-to-world-of-warcraft framing, all of it represented zynga trying to argue that this genre could grow up. when the genre died instead, the budget ceiling died with it. social games as a category became a small mobile-app footnote within five years of castleville's shutdown. the orchestral soundtrack idea has not been repeated since because there is no game-class today that needs it at this size.

the irish saxon vikings live on as still images in a few wikipedia article photos and on archive.org snapshots of the zynga marketing pages. the dallas studio that built the game was shuttered in 2015 in a layoff round. bill jackson moved on to other studios. the players who had built kingdoms in the game for five years had no save state to export and no migration path. on april 30, 2016 the url stopped loading and that was the end of castleville as a running thing.

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