10 Real Reasons Why Popular Video Games Died Overnight

There was a time when you couldn’t navigate Facebook for all the notifications asking you to send someone some hay or something on Farmville.

Facebook games had an iron grip on us for several years after they first added the feature in 2007, and two years in Farmville arrived to change everything. For perspective: there was a time where Farmville had more active users than the whole of Twitter, a now unthinkable amount in a post-Facebook-game society.

The problem was that Facebook games were unavoidably simplistic. Their repetitive nature both getting some people addicted whilst losing others quickly to boredom.

As smartphones got more popular and games began flooding the app store, they easily filled the niche that Facebook had been satisfying.

Companies that could moved their games out of Facebook and into the app market, no longer relying on Facebook as a host or a middle-man for in-app purchases. Just as Farmville had gotten people invested in casual games, it lost its players to the millions more made available in the wider world.