Farmville 2

 

Since its release date on the 5th of September 2012, Zynga's sequel to 'Farmville', 'Farmville 2' has had over 60 million monthly users. This week, there has been an increase of 6,300,000 users - 64,700,000 people now play Farmville  every month. Zynga has marketed Farmville 2 mostly using viral marketing techniques and channels, where it promotes the game to its existing users. Also, naming it 'Farmville 2' was a simple marketing technique as Tim LeTourneau, vice president of games at Zynga states, "What you're really looking at is the brand equity of FarmVille. In all of our testing, even though we tested different names for the game players, even seeing it and knowing the differences, consistently came back and said that FarmVille 2 was their favorite name because I think FarmVille for this audience, which is not the same as a hardcore gamer audience, you know, this is a broad audience that thinks more in terms of movie sequels than they do in game sequels. I think for them the brand that they know is FarmVille, and this is a farming game coming from Zynga, and so the logical name is FarmVille 2. We saw players over and over again resonate with that name more than any other. That was the reason the we decided to go with FarmVille 2." Naming it Farmville 2 attracted many existing gamers, and advertising it virally, on the likes of Facebook (which sponsers the game) where original Farmville players can see the title, means that many of the people who see it will recognise the franchise.