A handful of Zynga Facebook games saw tremendous drops in usage over the last month, with the company's top eight games losing over 10 million users due to changes made by Facebook developers removed third-party notifications.
Traditional retail games, and even console-based downloads may be subject to market changes, but they luckily don't have to contend with the entire marketplace changing, as many of Facebook game developers have had to over the last two months.According to a report published by Inside Social Games, the seemingly innocuous move by the designers of the social media site to recently remove third-party issued notification messages have kept players out of the loop regarding the latest developments in their games, and have kept many away for good. Zynga, in particular, saw a loss of over 10 million users across its top eight games during April, with Farmville losing over four million players, a drop that amounts to a little more than five percent of the game's entire 80 million player audience.
Other major drops over the course of April include MindJolt Games, which saw its 21 million player user base cut by over a third after suffering the month's biggest player loss of near eight million players. The second ranked Facebook game, Birthday Cards, suffered its second straight month of major losses, as it followed up a loss of over seven million players in March with a 5.5 million drop in April.
It should be interesting to see if Facebook game developers can stop the bleeding during the summer, or if the site will have to step in and keep games popular. To check out the top 25 Facebook games and how their audiences changed during April, check out the source link below.
SOURCE: Top 25 Facebook Games for May 2010 [Inside Social Games, via G4TV]
Source: Daily News from GamePro.com
Thursday, May 6, 2010