Hey What Ever Happened To Farmville For Windows Phones? In Fact, Where Is Zynga?
September 30, 2010 VentureBeat noted the following from a Microsoft GM at the GigaOm Mobilize conference:
In addition to bringing social games like Zynga’s Farmville to the Windows Phone, Microsoft is sparing no expense in helping develop traditional 2D and 3D games for the platform that would mimic the XBox Live experience on a console, Thompson said.
Of course, that was interpreted to mean that Farmville was coming to Windows Phones. And since that’s a Zynga title maybe there was hope that their other titles would follow. To date we have zero Zynga titles…except every day I have to listen to Doug Smith whine about how WP7 cannot be his daily driver because it lacks Zynga titles and all of his friends use iPhones so the Xbox Live draw doesn’t cut it for him. Seriously annoying. But back to the topic, what the heck man? I mean there’s been no news about this title and no noise at all about Zynga bringing their titles to the platform. The best I can do is re-interpret the quote to suggest that Thompson was merely speaking about social games and using Farmville as an example of what a social game is but not implying that that social game was coming. Weak sauce.
Anyway, what’s your thoughts on what the lack of Zynga titles means for Windows Phones?
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I have been emailing them about it with no reponse. Googled the heck mailing it and saw on wpcentral forums that someone had gotten through to them and got a response that they would not be supporting wp devices. This was back in April or may 2011. Nothing since. I may complain, but I never whine thank you very much!
Great, this is what I have to do to get you to read this site;)
i think it’s a cause for celebration that zynga ignoring WP. I hate those games from the depth of my soul.
A bit narrow minded there. Sure the games aren’t for everyone, but if you want your dear WP7 to flourish, it’s going to need all the support it can get. And that includes zynga.
And like Doug, Xbox live support doesn’t do shit for me, so wp7 still has zero features that draw me to it.
zynga’s going down
@Chris Leiter
I guess my hate for zynga is stronger than my love for WP 🙂
I have sent them two emails and gotten nothing but automated responses. Both times I explained why it was worth investing in the Windows Phone platform, so hopefully I at least made them consider it. I know that the lack of Zynga apps frustrates me immensely. This is mostly because all of my friends play Words with Friends and Hanging with Friends. I would love to take part in these games but cannot because Zynga is too stupid to realize that coding for Windows Phone is much easier than iOS and Android. My hatred for Zynga is growing by the day and won’t improve until I at least get one of those games that I mentioned. Farmville sucks, so I really don’t care at all about when that’s coming to the platform.
It’s taken me a lot to break the Farmville habit lol, but I *am* enjoying Words with Friends, so yeah, I wouldn’t mind having that on my phone. (It *was* one of the first things I put on my Kindle at Christmas…) I’d ask if it was a Flash issue, but then they’re on Apple devices, which have decreed Thou Shalt Not use Flash so that can’t be the issue.
Is it THAT big of a loss that they think they’d loose money over WP7? It can’t be that difficult to port. Strange.
…and as far as “Scramble with Friends” goes, I’ll stick to Wordament for now.
Personally, I could care less about Farmville, Zynga, or other social games. But as a Windows Phone advocate, for the sake of the platform’s viability, I’m saddened but not surprised. After today’s announcement that update transparency is going away and Microsoft effectively saying that consumers who choose to buy Windows Phone are less important than the carriers who extort money from said consumers, it’s just another blow to the only hope I had for the smartphone OS ecosystem.
I love Windows Phone and I want nothing more than to see it be successful and compete alongside iOS and Android, even if only with 20% market share someday. But as time passes, I see Microsoft and its partners continuing to make mistake-after-mistake. Time is running out and if they don’t start doing everything possible to attract consumers, it will become the next webOS. Except Microsoft is too anti-open-source to ever let it be released to the public community. Instead it will be buried as another great, but failed product like the KIN. It’s truly disheartening to watch it happen right before my eyes, but at the same time, what more can we (as defenders of the platform) do to save it? We can make noise and tell Microsoft when they make bad decisions, but ultimately Microsoft has to get it right for any of that to have an impact.