5. FarmVille - The Rise Of Freemium Management Hell
Just because a game is considered a landmark title doesn't mean it has to be any good. Case in point: the tiresome Facebook-based management game FarmVille. Developed by Zynga, a team of prolific game plagiarizers, FarmVille was a bitter piece of free-2-play gaming which went on to become one of the most prominent titles in the freemium management sector. It was a parasitic game which relied on generating soul-detroying tedium to prompt micro-transactions, and people just ate it up - at its peak, there were more people playing FarmVille than there are people alive on Earth (citation required). Hardcore gamers will argue that FarmVille is out of place on this list on the basis that it barely qualifies as a game at all, but lets not be elitists here - Zynga's casual farm management sim bewitched more gamers than most triple-A blockbusters could ever dream of. It was a formula which has since become one of the most copied and cloned game design concepts ever devised, and also the most denounced. Spend a bit of time researching the design elements underlying a free-2-play game like FarmVille and you'll probably start to feel a little uncomfortable - coercive monetization, paywalls and progress gates, it's tantamount to customer abuse. How many bored housewives have sat patiently waiting for their in-game energy to recharge so that they can plant another carrot or stroke a goat? And how many have grown impatient and whipped out that credit card to end the tedium? Zynga didn't invent freemium gaming, but FarmVille was undeniably the poster child for this horrid concept, a concept which was soon cloned again and again by Zynga themselves. Today the free-2-play landscape is polluted with the same sort of garbage, and we have the initially stratospheric rise of Zynga and FarmVille to blame for that.
Game-obsessed since the moment I could twiddle both thumbs independently. Equally enthralled by all the genres of music that your parents warned you about.
