Inside Social Games

Because MySpace doesn’t report active users (only total users) – something we think is hurting innovation on the MySpace Developer Platform - it’s hard to know exactly which games are doing best on a month to month basis in terms of active users. Regardless,there are always changes to report, despite how small they may or may not be.

This month, we saw a steady Top 10, but a handful of position swaps amongst the latter ranks. However, unlike the Facebook charts, the Top 25 games on MySpace did not see any new faces appear this time around.

Here are the highlights:

• The top three titles of Mobsters, Mafia Wars, and Bumper Stickers saw over a 100,000 new installs this past month, with nearly 300,000 for Bumper Stickers.
• RockYou’s SuperPets made impressive gains of over 600,000 total players.
• Playdom’s Poker Palace held strong at #12 and is proving to be much more popular here than on Facebook (where it fell from the Top 25 this month).
• Another title from Playdom, Overdrive, rose from #17 to #14 with a gain of 202,311 users, bringing its total up to just over 2 million.
• #16 Gang Wars, #20 Friend Factory, and #23 Rockstars lost a handful of total users, but nothing beyond 20k.
• And finally, Zynga players decided they liked the modern world more than pirate ships as Special Forces snuck its way into the #24 spot over Pirates – Rule the Caribbean!

As it stands, the competition for leadership on MySpace comes down to Zynga and Playdom with 20 out of the 25 top spots held by one or the other companies. Currently, Playdom holds 9 titles to Zynga’s 11, but the two companies’ dominance will not last forever. While some things may never change (i.e. Mobsters at #1, it would seem), there have been many new titles to break into the Top 25 MySpace games before, and if Farm Town can hit #4 in its debut on Facebook, then who’s to say someone cannot do the same on MySpace?