FishVille Game Suffers a Case of the 'Blah's Over First Weekend

FishVille, the Facebook game that tasks players with raising and selling fish while maintaining several virtual aquariums, is off to a rocky start on its first weekend. The game, which launched last week, has suffered a temporary case of the blahs (as in all of the popup text in the game simply said 'blah, blah" rather than actual words).

On Sunday morning, we logged in to find a notification that FishVille was "not available due to problems with a third-party developer." FishVille community manager Parizad says that the hiccup is "temporary" but there's no ETA when the game will return (and if the fish you've bought will still be alive).

This naturally brings up the larger topic: how resilient are players to games that launch in an incomplete state? So far it largely seems to depend on the game. For games with more universal appeal, i.e. Cafe World and FarmVille, it doesn't seem to be a problem. Is FishVille a compelling enough game to keep people hooked during the debugging phase? We'll see in the next few weeks.

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