Farmville on Twitch — competition and audience

FarmVille is a farming simulation social network game developed by Zynga in 2009. It is similar to Happy Farm, Farm Town, and video games such as the Story of Seasons series. Its gameplay involves various aspects of farm management such as plowing land, planting, growing, and harvesting crops, harvesting trees and raising livestock. FarmVille is available as an Adobe Flash application via the social-networking website Facebook and Microsoft's MSN Games, and was available as an application ("app") for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad for a brief period in 2010. The game is free to play; however, to progress quickly within the game, players are encouraged to spend Farm Cash (in FarmVille) or Farm Bucks (in FarmVille 2), which are purchasable with real-world currency, or to "get help from their friends". After its launch on Facebook in 2009, FarmVille became the most popular game on the site, and held that position for over two years. Starting after 2011, the game began experiencing a considerable decline in popularity. By May 2012, the game was ranked as the seventh most popular Facebook game. As of July 12, 2014, its rank had fallen to the seventy-third most popular Facebook game by Daily Active Users.