Early yesterday, we reported that CrowdStar had ported Happy Island to Android, marking one of the first times we’ve seen a successful Facebook game go to the mobile platform. Now Playdom says that it too has jumped into the fray, with an Android version of Social City.
Both Happy Island and Social City previously had iPhone versions, which is still fairly unusual even for Facebook’s most successful games (the two peaked at 12.3 and 12.6 million monthly active users respectively, according to AppData).
However, social game developers are slowly venturing back into mobile. Several companies, including Zynga, tried and then pulled away from the iPhone in 2009, but Zynga also helped revive the idea this year with the release of FarmVille for iPhone.
For now, CrowdStar and Playdom are alone among the top five Facebook developers in offering Android games. That’s not likely to last long, though. Android is growing quickly, enough so that some analysts are predicting that it will become the second-largest mobile operating system this year, coming in right behind the iPhone.
Source: Inside Social Games
Tuesday, August 31, 2010