Inside Social Games

Despite the inability to see monthly active users on the MySpace Platform, the level of change within the MySpace gaming charts this past month has been rather large. We saw some significant gains in the RPG genre this month, the disappearance of others, and even a few new faces joining the table. Perhaps most significant of all, none of the new titles are owned by either Playdom or Zynga.

Here are the highlights of this month’s movers and shakers:

• Mobsters and Mafia Wars continue to see positive growth in monthly installs, with the latter gaining 131k more installations than Mobsters’ 46k.
• Players have decided they like to integrate pets with poking more than simply just having them, as SuperPoke Pets surpasses Super Pets with 5.6 million users.
• YoVille showed us that a virtual world are gaining more ground than sucking blood or racing cars with approximately 4.7 million users compared to Vampires’ and Street Racing’s respective 4.5 and 4.4 million.
• The drink sharing game from BitRhymes, Cheers!!, made its way back into the charts with gusto, reappearing at #13 with about 2.9 million users. Tag Me also got added to the list with 2,666,843 users.
• Gang Wars from Zynga beat out Playdom’s Heroes 1,971,708 to 1,964,232. However, both games garnered less popularity than the previous month.
• And finally, Truth Box (Bit Rhymes), Rockstars (Playdom), and Special Forces (Zynga) all get knocked off the charts to make way for an odd little quiz game from “Grong!” called What My Friends Think About Me.

As is the case on Facebook, the social gaming space on MySpace has seen quite a bit of change lately. Though it doesn’t seem as dramatic, it is still rather significant. What we haven’t seen, however, is the same level of evolution in games on MySpace as we have with Facebook. The text-based RPG still dominates MySpace and we have seen less of the farming phenomena that is saturating Facebook.