Zynga announced today it’s partnered with CoolGames on the launch of a new HTML5 game on Facebook Gaming. The new game is Farm Merge Valley, and the title tells you most of what you need to know about it. It’s a farming game with merge mechanics, which joins many other games in the now-booming merge mobile genre.
Farm Merge Valley is an agriculture-based merging game, in which players build up their farms and harvest crops. CoolGames has incorporated social elements, as players can invite friends to their farms to complete tasks. Scott Koenigsberg, Zynga’s chief product officer, said in a statement, “Farm Merge Valley expands the possibility of HTML5 through its social and building hybrid model and we cannot wait for our global audience to engage with the game.”
Saying “farm game” and “Facebook” in the same breath brings to mind Farmville, one of Facebook’s first major games. It paved the way for the social media platform’s new genre of casual gameplay, and raised Zynga’s own profile. Zynga acquired MyMiniLife, and then used that team to create FarmVille. The game exploded in popularity. The game shuttered in 2020, and Zynga has moved on to new farm titles.
Facebook’s dedicated Gaming app officially shut down on October 28, with the company reintegrating some of its features and games onto the main app. Whether Farm Merge Valley can replicate the success of its predecessor remains to be seen. Laurens Rutten, CEO of CoolGames, seems to think so, saying, “Merge is one of the fastest growing game genres in mobile and … We believe that there’s a vast untapped potential for deep and high-quality merge games on HTML5 game platforms too.”