Those crops need harvesting! Social phenomenon Farmville is now available on the iPhone and iPod touch.
A portable iteration of Zynga’s popular farming simulation game was originally announced for Apple’s portables at this year’s WWDC, and the application is now available in all iTunes stores.
The farming game, which sees players buying and selling crops and livestock, made its debut on Facebook in June 2009; just last year, quickly rising to millions of players. At its absolute peak the game has attracted more than 85 million players, and now with the addition of a free app Zynga is no doubt hoping that figure will increase.
On the web, Farmville is strictly a Flash-only affair, but of course to debut on the iPhone developers Zynga had to create a non-Flash compatible version of the popular game. Its new 9.7MB iPhone friendly version of the farming simulation title works in a similar fashion to that of the online game, allowing gamers to access their same farm from Facebook and tend to their crops and animals.
New gamers will need a Facebook account to play, whereas existing players can simply login with their Facebook credentials. Once connected, any changes made on a players portable farm will be reflected on a users Facebook farm, and vice-versa. Those who do choose to download the app will find a range of new Farmville items available which are exclusive to iPhone and iPod Touch users, including a Snow Leopard.
The launch of the Farmville application comes at a good time for Zynga, as pointed out by Mashable, despite the games huge popularity the titles install base has seen a drop in recent months, losing nearly 10 million players in the last 30 days alone.
Do you already play FarmVille, and will you be downloading the new mobile version of the game? Or are you one of those who avoids social games like these at all costs to avoid Facebook notification insanity?
via theAppleBlog.com