FarmVille 2 has 17 players in the Vatican and other ‘big data’ trivia

FarmVille 2 info

Struggling social-game giant Zynga has more than 42.4 million monthly active players for FarmVille 2, and that means it can dig out all sorts of interesting details about those people playing the online social game on Facebook and Zynga.com.

The surprising facts from Zynga’s findings include: 17 players are in the Vatican City. Maybe the Pope is playing? FarmVille 2 launched in September. While it isn’t as popular at this point in its life cycle as the original FarmVille was at its peak (around 83 million monthly active users), the numbers of people playing it is still impressive.

Zynga also says it has nine players in Tuvalu, a remote island nation with a population of 10,544. About players harvest 350 million crops every day and plant more than 8,000 every second. Enough virtual fertilizer has been produced to cover 24 million acres of farmland. Zynga says its Water.org charitable campaign in FarmVille 2 set a record for player donations from any Zynga game in 2012. My favorite stat: 17,876 people received a lifetime supply of clean water in real life, thanks to the donations.

FarmVille 2 almanac

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.