Empires & Allies

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

~ the obituary ~

By 2011 the Facebook game had stopped being a novelty and become a thing you blocked. Anybody with an account got the requests whether they played or not, and most people learned where the hide-all-updates-from-this-app option lived before they learned what any of the games actually did. I never played Empires & Allies. I could still have told you the icon, which is a strange kind of fame and exactly the kind Zynga was buying.

It launched on 1 June 2011 in twelve languages, out of Zynga's Los Angeles studio, and the numbers were the biggest the company had ever posted. Close to ten million people signed up in the first nine days, and by the third week of June it was carrying thirty-three million a month. Inside a few weeks it was the fourth most popular game on Facebook, which at that moment meant the fourth most popular game anywhere that mattered commercially.

The design was the FarmVille loop with a war painted on it. You built an island base and collected resources on a timer, then sent units at your neighbors. The combat was light and turn-based and mostly an excuse to need more of everything, and the multiplayer was the same friend-network pressure Zynga had already perfected: you needed allies, allies were people on your friend list, and getting them involved was a button.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The timing was not accidental. Zynga filed for its public offering on 1 July 2011, a month after the launch, and went out in December at a valuation that assumed Facebook games were a durable business rather than a moment. Empires & Allies was the proof exhibit, the newest title with the steepest growth curve the company had ever put in front of anyone, offered as evidence that Zynga could keep manufacturing hits instead of having gotten lucky with a farm.

The curve did what those curves do. Facebook changed how apps could reach a user's feed, the invitation spam that drove the whole model got throttled, and every Zynga title started shedding players at roughly the same rate. Empires & Allies had grown faster than anything before it and it shrank on the same schedule as everything else, which told you the growth had never been about this game in particular.

~ the funny part ~

On 24 April 2013 Zynga announced it would close Empires & Allies along with three other titles. The final date, 17 June, was confirmed on 16 May. In the same season the company cut about eighteen percent of its staff, and weeks after the game went dark it replaced its chief executive. There was no product failure to point at. The company had simply decided that browser games on Facebook were not where the next decade was, and it was right.

Then, on 5 May 2015, Zynga released a mobile game called Empires & Allies. Different studio and a different genre, with the same name bolted on the front. The old game had two years of accounts and bases that stopped existing in 2013, and searching for it now leads to a live product with no relationship to it at all. Killing a game deletes the game. Reusing its name deletes the memory of it, which is a more complete job.

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