Kicking off our top 25 Facebook games for July are the usual Zynga titles CityVille, FarmVille, FrontierVille, Texas HoldEm Poker, and Mafia Wars — but the real story is Zynga newcomer Empires & Allies, which debuts in the top three across both monthly active users and daily active users. As compared to last month’s rankings, it looks like fewer than half our top 25 games experienced losses in MAU or DAU — which could indicate that though summer vacation kicked off in early to mid-June, plenty of players are back in front of their computers as of July 1.
Empires & Allies is a war-themed hybrid city-builder/strategy game where players construct military and civilian structures to generate individual army units that can be led into asynchronous battles against other artificial intelligence controlled opponents. Because the game shares many mechanics with CityVille and because it launched in 12 languages worldwide, Empires & Allies got off to a strong start after its June 1 launch, eclipsing Zynga sibling FarmVille in a little over three weeks. Even so, it’s got a long way to go to top CityVille in MAU or DAU.
We begin the rankings this month with DAU, which is a measure of a game’s overall retention when compared to MAU. Two notable newcomers to the list are แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม — a Thai-language game about taking care of a pig — and Tetris Battle, a multiplayer version of the classic arcade game that we recently reviewed.
As for the top 25 games by MAU on Facebook, we see Gaia Online’s Monster Galaxy muscling its way into the top 5 after Playdom’s Gardens of Time apparently loses momentum. Games portal MindJolt Games also squeezes in right at the end, though its rival, GSN’s Games portal, is still well ahead of it at number 13 this month. We recently spoke with GSN about its long term growth plan as compared to competitors King.com (whose standalone title, Bubble Saga, still sits in the top 25 by MAU and DAU for a second month running) and MindJolt.
All results of our Top 25 articles are based on information collected from AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and their developers.
Source: Inside Social Games
Friday, July 1, 2011