Treasure Isle

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

~ the obit ~

treasure isle landed on the facebook canvas 4 april 2010, right in the window where zynga was shipping a new ville every couple of months and the wall-post gift spam had become the dominant background noise of the platform. i was 26, ankara, masters student on facebook as a light lurker, and every single friend list ping about a lost jewel or a shovel gift was coming from someone i knew but not someone i wanted to click through to.

this happened more on the english facebook feed than where i actually was, though the tr localization was live by then and plenty of my ankara list ran the same apps. to be honest, the ville catalog was already a genre, not a game. farmville had shipped june 2009 and hit 83 million monthly actives by march 2010. treasure isle was the sand-and-palm-tree skin on the same energy-and-friend-gate loop.

you dug on beaches for gems and pineapples, you sent gift requests to friends who sent them back. the map covered a bunch of themed islands with names like coconut cove and lost tiki. the digging cost energy, energy refilled on a real-world timer, and if you did not want to wait you paid island cash for a full bar (close enough).

i did not install it. anyway, plenty of my facebook friend list did. the notification stream reached me through the shovel-request mechanic, which was the whole distribution channel. still. by the summer of 2010 the game had climbed into the top ten of facebook apps, sitting near farmville and cafe world in the daily-actives charts. it never overtook farmville. nothing in the ville catalog ever did.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it did ~

the loop was straightforward, you picked an island and started digging tiles for treasure. treasures unlocked new areas, new areas held bigger treasures. the energy meter refilled about one point every five minutes, which meant the whole game was designed around three checkins a day (roughly).

gift-giving was the viral engine. anyway, to expand your crew or unlock a new island you sent a gift request to a friend and they had to accept for you to get the item. the game trained the whole facebook friend list to click acceptance links and grow the reach. by mid-2010 the ville-family shovel and coconut posts were an actual background layer of the feed, alongside the farmville pig posts and the cafe world burnt-lasagna posts.

~ how it ended ~

this part was in the calendar for anyone reading gaming coverage in late 2012. anyway, zynga had a hard year, the ipo priced at ten dollars in december '11 and the stock collapsed under three dollars by the november earnings call. mark pincus announced an eleven-title cost cut on that call and the shutdown schedule went into the release notes.

treasure isle and fishville went first on 5 december 2012. the two of them were the earliest kills in the batch, the compensation package pushed players toward castleville or farmville 2 with virtual goods. anyone who wanted their treasure map or their dug-up gems in any form was out of luck, everything was server-side and there was no local export.

~ what got buried with it ~

this part you had to be a '10 facebook casual for. anyway, the ville-family loop kept running inside farmville 2 and castleville for another few years before those also got killed. treasure isle itself did not get a second life, no mobile port and no third-party clone that carried the name forward.

still, treasure isle's spot in the memory is that it was one half of the first pair off the ledger in the biggest ville-family cull zynga ever ran. for what its worth. it beat fishville by literally hours in the shutdown timeline, both apps pulled the same day, the two names printed together in every writeup that covered the announcement.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »