FarmVille is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social-networking website Facebook and as an App on both the Apple iPhone and Android. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by plowing land, planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, harvesting trees and bushes, and by raising livestock.[2] FarmVille started as a clone of the popular Farm Town, which also on Facebook in June 2009,[3][4] but has since grown to be the social network's most popular application, with over 62 million active users and over 24.6 million Facebook application fans as of September 2010.[5] Ten percent of all Facebook users play it.[6][7] Despite this, Farmville is still classed by Zynga as being in a "Beta Testing Stage", with "all of [their] players ... currently considered Testers."
On February 4, 2010, Microsoft's MSN Games also launched FarmVille on its website,[8][9] requiring a Facebook account but not a Windows Live ID in order to play the game. On June 7, 2010, at Apple's WWDC, the CEO of Zynga announced that they were porting FarmVille for the Flash-less iOS platform.[10] It was later released on June 23, 2010 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
