PetVille

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

~ the last words ~

i was twenty seven when petville opened on facebook. the audience zynga was selling to was the casual facebook games tier, pixel pets adopted on lunch breaks and fed with real money virtual food. i had a facebook account in '10 the way most engineers in ankara had one, lurking and posting holiday photos, but pixel pets were not what i was reaching for. petville hit me through the press only, the same way farmville and mafia wars had landed on me a year earlier as headlines about zynga's facebook empire rather than as anything i ever played.

petville launched on facebook in september '10 as a pet themed sibling of fishville and farmville. you adopted a pixel dog or cat and decorated a house for it. zynga's revenue model was the same as the rest of the catalog, in app virtual currency called pet bucks paid for with real dollars or earned slowly through gameplay. you spent the pet bucks on pet food and clothing items the dog wore around the house.

this happened more in the san francisco gaming press than where i was. petville crossed seven and a half million facebook likes through '11. the daily active player count was already drifting down by mid '12 as the zynga ville tier collectively bled engagement to mobile titles like candy crush and the early king and supercell catalogues. by november '12 daily players were around sixty thousand. mark pincus announced a company wide cost cut and a refocus on mobile. petville and ten other facebook titles were named for shutdown across december.

this part you literally had to be on facebook in '12 for, and i was not paying close attention. zynga closed petville on 30 december '12 alongside mafia wars 2, fishville, montopia, vampire wars, indiana jones adventure world, plus five others in the same wave. the press called it the "unhappy new year" round of cuts. players who logged in the day after the shutdown got a refund of unused pet bucks. the pets vanished from facebook. there was no migration to a successor product, no save format that another zynga title could read, the dog you had decorated a house for simply stopped existing.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

petville was a single screen facebook app, you opened it from the facebook left rail and the canvas loaded a flash animation of your living room. the pet wandered around the room. it had hunger and happiness meters that ticked down over time and that you topped up with food clicks or play clicks. the meter mechanic was lifted directly from tamagotchi and pet society, the visual style was the same flat cartoon zynga used for every "ville" title.

you decorated the house with rugs and furniture bought in coin bucks. you bought outfits for the dog. you sent the pet on play dates with your facebook friends' pets, which generated wall posts that pulled new players in. the viral wall post mechanic was the whole growth engine for the early "ville" catalog. when facebook tightened the rules on auto generated wall posts in '11 and '12, the growth engine for every game in that catalog cracked at the same time.

~ the fall ~

this happened more in the silicon valley games press than where i was. zynga's whole 2010-2012 strategy was the facebook canvas. by mid '12 it was clear the canvas was no longer enough. facebook's algorithm changes had killed the free viral install loop. the user base was migrating to mobile, where the new king of casual games had become candy crush, which ran on iphone in a way facebook canvas titles could not. zynga's stock had fallen by sixty percent through '12, the company was bleeding money on facebook product teams that no longer had a working acquisition channel.

pincus announced the cost cut in november '12, the public framing was a "focus on the games that are working". in practice it meant ending nine projects and shutting down eleven facebook canvas titles. petville was one of the eleven. by the time the dec '12 shutdown wave hit, the active player count was around sixty thousand a day on a game that had been at fifteen million plus the year before. the game had not failed in any product sense, the canvas it ran on had stopped working as a distribution layer.

~ what got buried with it ~

this part you had to be a 2011 facebook casual player for, and i was not. the pets are gone. petville is not playable anywhere now, the canvas app is deleted off facebook and the flash assets that drove the animations are unrenderable since flash player shut down on 31 december '20. nobody has reverse engineered a private server for the game, the demographic that played it was not the demographic that preserves dead games. the seven and a half million facebook likes still exist as an empty page that loads to a generic facebook 404.

zynga survived the cut. the company pivoted to mobile and over the next decade rebuilt itself around words with friends and the slot machine acquisitions of the late 2010s, take two interactive acquired the whole thing in may '22 for twelve point seven billion dollars. petville exists in that history only as a single line in the "discontinued titles" section of zynga's wikipedia table. the dog you fed real money to keep alive belonged to the brief window when facebook casual games were the biggest product story in software, and that window closed at the same time the game did.

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