The rapid growth of Zynga’s Empires and Allies to 50 million players within a month of launching highlights the strength of a fast-rising genre of Facebook games: strategy.

Broadly defined, strategy refers to combat and resource-management games with military themes and conceits, generally played on a map-like field.

They have long been the province of hardcore gamers — predominantly competitive males in their 20s to 40s who are perhaps best represented by PC game hits such as the Starcraft, Command and Conquer, and Civilization franchises.

Since the launch of last year’s Backyard Monsters, strategy games have amassed an extremely large aggregate user base, reportedly earning average revenue per user rates (ARPU) that are typically larger than other Facebook games.

Sizing The Market

SocialTimes Pro estimates that the strategy game market on Facebook represents at least 80 million monthly active users. According to  AppData.com, the most popular strategy games on the social network are (listed by title, company, monthly active users and daily active users):

1. Empires and Allies, Zynga,  52 million, 7.4 million
2. Army Attack, Digital Chocolate, 5.3 million, 634 million
3. Backyard Monsters, Kixeye, 3.9 million, 931 million
4. Dragons of Atlantis, Kabam, 3.8 million, 497 million
5. Global Warfare, Kabam, 2.8 million,  279,000
6. Galaxy Online II, IGG Inc.2, 2.4 million, 210,000
7. Social Empires, SocialPoint, 2.3 million, 229,000
8. Kingdoms of Camelot, Kabam,  1.5 million, 355,000
9. Glory of Rome, Kabam, 1.49 million, 153,000
10. City Wars, FunStar Studios, 1.3 million, .88,000
11. Battle Pirates, Kixeye, 965,000,  104,000
12. Doomsday Defense, IGG. Inc., 509,000, 37,000
13. Age of Champions, KlickNation, 507,000, 54,000

The Totals

The top 13 entries together have around 79 million monthly active users and over 11 million daily active users. Many additional titles attract monthly actives by the hundreds of thousands — and that brings the total number of people playing strategy games to over 80 million.

While Zynga's Empires and Allies has the lion's share of this market, Kabam has the largest library of hit strategy games, with four titles accounting for nearly 10 million monthly active users.

Digital Chocolate’s Army Attack, a turn-based strategy game in the vein of the Nintendo hit Advance Wars, has enjoyed tremendously strong growth since launching last June, and has even attracted a following of seasoned game developers like BioShock lead designer Ken Levine.

The game with the highest number of daily active users in relation to monthly active users is probably Kixeye's Backyard Monsters, with nearly 25 percent of the user base logging in daily to play. (However, Kabam cites internal data in order to claim even higher numbers.)

While Zynga's Empires and Allies is far and away the genre's market leader, it's important (as with all titles by this manufacturer) to factor in the company's massive, pre-existing user base from legacy games such as FarmVille and Texas Hold 'Em, who are all likeliest to try out new titles.

Learn more about how strategy games are engaging and attracting new users on Facebook by clicking here to read the latest report from Social Times Pro. If you're not already a subscriber, click here to become one or buy the individual report.

Source: All Facebook