Inside Social Games

We have just compiled the latest numbers and here are the Facebook gaming charts for October 24, 2008.

As you can see there were some pretty massive movements in the Facebook gaming world over the last month. Clearly, the impact of the Facebook redesign is being felt by different social game developers in different ways.

• Lil Green Patch extended its lead by nearly half a million monthly active users to 6.5 million total, remaining the largest game on the Facebook Platform. Green Patch also quietly released sister title Lil Blue Cove recently, which has been growing quite quickly.
• Kidnap broke onto the charts with over 2 million monthly active users. Interestingly, Kidnap was originally developed as a sponsored app by Context Optional for the Travel Channel. It’s not the first time that’s happened, Area/Code developed Parking Wars for A&E earlier this year and it grew to over 500,000 monthly actives.
• Playfish’s Pet Society gained nearly 750,000 monthly active users since last month to reach nearly 2.5 million in October, while Who Has the Biggest Brain lost 600,000 to 2.9 million. Overall, Playfish retained its leadership position with 4 apps in the top 10.
• Several large games saw drops in their monthly traffic numbers - Owned, Friends For Sale, Nicknames, and Speed Racing.
• Zynga had a mixed month in terms of growth, but held its position with 4 games in the top 25. Texas HoldEm held at 5.1 million monthly actives nicely, and YoVille grew by over 350,000 users to over 2.3 million. However, My Heroes Ability fell by 300,000 and Scramble by 250,000 during the same time.
• Two additional games emerged on the leaderboards as well. TheBroth’s KickMania and Tetris Online’s Tetris Friends each showed impressive gains of around 750,000 monthly actives, starting from scratch.

As KickMania, Tetris Friends, and Kidnap show, ample opportunity exists for new games to emerge and grow quickly - even on the new Facebook. At the same time, top game developers must build increasingly engaging and social experiences to stay on top - otherwise, Facebook game audiences can fade away quickly.