FarmVille and Facebook

Farmville is a simple concept: ‘grow crops’, ‘harvest’ them, and exchange them for ‘cash’ which moves you up through the levels, whereby experience points allow you to attain other crops, bigger farms, decorations and animals. Riveting. So much so that a recently published article claimed most users came to Facebook because of Farmville and Mafia Wars, another of Zynga ’s Facebook gaming titles, rather than vice-versa. At the moment FarmVille has almost 83 million users around the world hooked, read hopelessly addicted, via Facebook.

However recent news suggests the Social gaming company, one of Facebook’s biggest partners, may be 86’d from the world’s largest social networking party and its 400 million plus guests. Times Online was one of the first to report that Zynga, the company behind Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, FishVille & Zynga Poker , some of the most popular online games, is now in a tiff with Facebook over, what else but, money.

At the moment progression through Farmville, and Zynga’s other gaming platforms, is reliant on earning and spending ‘cash’ which is earned playing the game but can also be bought, with real currency should the need to level up quicker exceed your common sense – as a pre teen Briton’s did to the tune of almost a grand , over half of which was on his mother’s credit card. Facebook are soon to introduce ‘Facebook credits’, a virtual currency that it insists will be the only type of cash allowed on the site from which it will take a 30 percent commission of any and all revenues generated by companies and developers using the Facebook ecosystem. Unreasonable? Apple demands for the similar slice of the pie from developers selling on their app store…

Facebook has since turned off all notification feeds from Zynga applications, no doubt annoying millions & making new developers think twice about utilising the Facebook platform, whilst Zynga’s threat to abandon Facebook completely means they’ll lose out on access to Facebook’s massive membership. Whatever the outcome It doesn’t look like either company will come up smelling roses from this spat.

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