Kicking off the month of August on Facebook are many of the games we’re very used to seeing in the top 10, and most of which belong to Zynga: CityVille, FarmVille, and newcomer Empires & Allies. A couple of up-and-coming games catch our eye, however, toward the lower end of our top 25 Facebook games by daily active and monthly active users. Gardens of Time, meanwhile, maintains steady growth even as Playdom moves on to launching newer titles.
We begin with daily active users, which is a better measure of overall audience engagement. Fourteen games in our list experienced losses in DAU, the largest of which occurring Zynga’s CityVille and FarmVille. Empires & Allies manages a small gain, meanwhile, which makes us wonder about the traffic targets Facebook and Zynga agreed upon in exchange for title exclusivity on the social network as the game’s MAU has remained mostly flat since July 17.
As for games new or at least renewed on this list, we see arcade classic newcomer Tetris Battle moving up half a dozen spots to land at No.19. Playtika’s slot machine sim, Slotomania, lands at No.22, suggesting that despite some reported glitches and gripes among users, the developer is putting funds from its partial acquisition by Caesars Entertainment to good use. Meanwhile, down at No.25, Zoo World 2 makes its first appearance after launching in mid-June. The game is currently being fitted with developer RockYou’s new ad platform.
Moving on to MAU, we count 18 games with traffic losses — again, the heaviest of which coming from CityVille and FarmVille. Mall World and It Girl get enough of a lift to push Ravenwood Fair and MindJolt Games off the rankings, and here again we see the impact of Zoo World 2 on the rise.
With so many developers and publishers launching new games in late July on through August, we expect to see some movement in the sub-top 10 area of our MAU leaderboards as the games find traction. It’ll be interesting to see if games from developers that recently merged with publisher — like PopCap with EA or Lolapps with 6waves — manage to move all the way up into the top 5.
*Zoo World 2 appears in our AppData traffic tracking service as Zoo World on account of the developer running both games through a single app ID. Developer RockYou has not broken out the sequel’s traffic from the original game’s.
Source: Inside Social Games
Tuesday, August 2, 2011