FishVille

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

~ the goodbye ~

fishville landed on facebook on 6 november 2009, about five months after farmville. same loop, different theme. you owned an aquarium instead of a farm. you bought pixel fish through a store menu, fed them through three life stages from baby to adult, sold them for sand coins when they matured. the freemium currency was called sand dollars, you paid real money for those.

i was twenty five, on facebook only as a light lurker in ankara, doing a masters at that point. still. the ville catalog was a genre i knew existed and did not touch. fishville hit through the same wall-post spam channel every zynga title used, gift requests for fish food and aquarium upgrades filling up my notifications tab.

the peak was around 1.6 million monthly active users in october 2011, a fraction of farmville's forty million but respectable inside the ville family. really though, fishville was one of the smaller vilies zynga kept running, meant to funnel players toward the flagship titles. by mid-2012 the daily active count had cratered.

zynga announced the shutdown on 2 november 2012, one month before the actual closure. fishville was paired with treasure isle in the same announcement, both were the first casualties of the eleven-game cull that would run through december 2012 and end with petville on the thirtieth.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

still. fishville ran as a single flash canvas app on facebook. you clicked to place fish, you clicked to feed them on a real-world timer. the growth cycle for a fish was measured in real-world hours, which meant the game trained the same timer-checking behavior farmville had. anyway, you came back three times a day to feed the fish before they starved. really though, if you missed a feeding cycle your fish died and you lost the sand coins you had put into it.

there was a battle arena tank that showed up mid-2010, you fed fish "super foods" to buff their stats and pitted them against friends' fish for prizes. the gift-back economy was built on daily aquarium visits, you dropped by a friend's tank to feed their fish and got a bonus in your own. all of it ran through the facebook social graph, which was the whole distribution engine.

~ the cull ~

zynga had a hard 2012. the ipo from december 2011 had priced at ten dollars and by november 2012 the stock was under three dollars, a seventy percent drop inside eleven months. mark pincus announced the "focus on games that are working" cost cut in the november earnings call. eleven titles were named for shutdown across december.

this happened more in the business press than in the facebook feed by that point. fishville and treasure isle went first on 5 december 2012, montopia followed on 21 december, then petville, mafia wars 2, vampire wars, indiana jones adventure world, plus four others closed on 30 december in the biggest single-day wave the ville catalog ever had. really though, this was the moment the facebook casual-game era officially began winding down.

~ what remains ~

this part you had to be a 2010 facebook casual player for. the pixel aquariums are gone. zynga gave players a compensation pack of virtual goods playable inside castleville, chefville, farmville 2, mafia wars, or yoville. that was the migration path. anyone who wanted to keep their fishville tank in any form did not have one, the game was fully server-side and there was no local save.

in those days. the game exists now only as youtube gameplay footage from 2010-2011 and a wikipedia article that runs less than a page. the facebook app page still returns a 404 fifteen years later. really though, this was zynga's smallest surviving ville by daily actives at the time of shutdown, and the first name on the list when the cull began.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »