Vampire Wars

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

~ the goodbye ~

vampire wars had already peaked and started sliding by the time i saw the name land in a notification. mid-2009, ankara, masters student on facebook as a very light lurker. the ville catalog was already a genre i knew from the wall spam, this one was zynga's vampire-themed sibling of mafia wars, shipped in june 2008 while zynga was still building the pipeline that would produce farmville a year later.

though facebook had turkish localization already so plenty of my friends list was inside the same platform. vampire wars ran on the same click-your-turn-then-wait energy loop mafia wars had trained everyone into. still, you built a clan and you fought other clans in turn-based battles that resolved in a single click. real money bought blood or fangs to skip cooldowns. by early '09 it was briefly the most popular app on the facebook canvas, then mafia wars pulled past it and became the flagship of the crime-family category.

i was on facebook light through the masters year of '09-'10. either way, my facebook friends list was a mix of ankara engineering students and a handful of eu people i had met on forums. still, the vampire wars notification stream reached me through the friend-clan invite mechanic, which was the whole distribution engine. i did not install it, i knew people who did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it played ~

anyway, the game was a click-and-wait facebook app that ran on the mafia wars core loop. you started with a low-level vampire character, gained xp from clan raids, unlocked new abilities from a skill tree. the energy meter refilled on a real-world timer, which meant you came back three times a day if you were trying to level fast.

the currencies were coins for regular items and premium credits called blood for real-money purchases. blood let you skip cooldowns or buy special vampire abilities that took longer to earn otherwise. clan membership was capped and expanded through invites, which is the mechanic zynga used to make every vampire wars player also become a distribution channel for the game. the whole viral loop ran on facebook wall posts asking friends to join your clan.

~ the cull ~

zynga had a hard 2012, ipo priced at ten dollars in december 2011 and the stock collapsed under three dollars by november. mark pincus announced the cost cut on the november earnings call and named eleven titles for shutdown across december. fishville and treasure isle went first on 5 december, vampire wars was pulled the same day.

by then vampire wars had drifted to 330,000 monthly active users and 30,000 daily actives per appdata, which was a tenth of what it had been at peak. still. zynga's statement talked about focusing resources on newer titles. the compensation package pushed players toward castleville or mafia wars with virtual goods playable inside those games. anyone who wanted their vampire wars character in any form was out of luck, everything was server-side and there was no export.

~ what got buried with it ~

this part you had to be a 2009 facebook heavy for. anyway, kano/apps and other zynga-alumni studios kept the format alive on other platforms with slight rewrites, still going in 2026 as browser-based clan mafia games. the mafia wars branding survived a few more years at zynga itself before that also got killed. either way, the vampire skin of the same mechanic did not get a second life.

a fan petition on gopetition tried to save the game in november 2012 and got ignored. the shutdown day passed quietly, the app was pulled from facebook, the flash canvas stopped loading. the biggest thing vampire wars had going for it in cultural memory was that it had briefly been zynga's most popular title before mafia wars took the crown, a footnote most of the wider facebook audience does not remember.

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