Adobe Flash Officially Dies, Taking FarmVille on Facebook to the Grave

Image: Zynga

Adobe Flash Player was finally laid to rest on Dec. 31, 2020, effectively killing off all Flash-based browser games and online media. Unfortunately, this included FarmVille — the farming simulator game on Facebook that, at one point, had 30 million daily users addicted to cultivating crops and raising livestock.

FarmVille was among a handful of games that ushered in a new era of “social” online gaming, and arguably laid the groundwork for games like Animal Crossing.

After Facebook announced the end of support for Flash-based games earlier this year, Zynga announced Dec. 31, 2020, as the end of life date for FarmVille in September. This gave players plenty of time to harvest their crops one last time and say goodbye to their farm animals.

This had already been a long time coming, however, as Adobe had already announced in 2017 that Flash Player would be discontinued on Dec. 31, 2020. The plugin was simply ridden with security vulnerabilities and became a pain to maintain.

Already itching for it to be killed off, industry giants like Google and Facebook soon joined Adobe in retiring the once-revolutionary medium for content delivery over internet browsers and replacing it with HTML5.

In April 2010, late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs declared his thoughts on Adobe Flash.

We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

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If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features.

Of course, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the time dismissed Jobs’ concerns, which looking back, were completely correct.

If you’re still looking for a taste of the farm life, you can take your shovel and pitchfork over to FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape and FarmVille 2: Country Escape, or wait for Zynga’s nearing worldwide release of FarmVille 3 for mobile devices.