FarmVille turned five years old

The genre of "time managers", which today are often called "farms" and "builders", was not invented by Zynga. However, it was her FarmVille that largely determined how games of this genre look today. Happy Birthday, FarmVille, happy fifth birthday!

FarmVille, released on July 19, 2009, was far from the first successful farm. Moreover, it is not the first successful farm on social networks. 

The laurels of the discoverer of the genre belong to the Chinese Happy Farm, officially released in 2008 on the Tencent QQ platform, whose MAU during the rise of the popularity of the game was 23 million. The game is now considered the ideological heir to the Japanese role-playing series Harvest Moon. 

Happy Farm

After that, in February 2009, Farm Town by Slashkey was released on Facebook. The project turned out to be a mix of Happy Farm and the very popular social network YoVille from Zynga at that time. By June of the same year, the game is in fourth place in popularity on Facebook with a MAU of 8 million.

In the wake of the success of these games, Zynga publishes FarmVille, developed by MyMiniLife Studio. By October 2009, the game had 20 million MAU users, crowds of fans and the first place in the top of the most popular Facebook games.

Looking back at the crazy success of the project in the West, many studios begin to churn out clones of the project, after a while their number and diversity leads not only to the formation of a full-fledged genre, but also its further evolution. 

Distant relatives of FarmVille today can be called a huge number of current hits. Among them: Clash of Clans, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Ice Age Village, Smurfs' Village, The Tribez and many, many others.