Inside Social Games

MySpace social game rankings don’t usually change much, but they did this past month. BitRhymes and RockYou managed to climb up the charts.

Meanwhile, Zynga and Playdom continue to hold many of the top spots within the space. Their role-playing games continue to slide up and down the charts, as users find themselves preferring new game features being constantly introduced by the companies.

Here are the highlights from this past month:

• Playdom’s Mobsters continues its reign at #1 with nearly 14 million installs as of this past month, but it’s followed closely by Zynga’s Mafia Wars, with approximately 12.5 million.
• With nearly 400,000 more installs this time around, YoVille holds on at #8 with an impressive 5,026,949 installs.
• BitRyhmes beats out the Playdom powerhouse for the #14 spot with Tag Me (BitRhymes’ other title, Cheers!! comes in at #12 with over 3 million installs), thereby knocking the game, Sorority Life, down to #15. Of course, the Playdom title still garners over 3 million installs, growing by nearly 200,000 since last month.
• Speed Racing, from RockYou, shows an impressive leap, jumping from #20 to #17 with just over 2 million game installations.
• Also, Zynga’s Dragon Wars takes over the #19 spot with 1,966,774 installs (15,588 more than last month) as Playdom’s Heroes loses a little over 12,000 on its monthly install rate, tallying in at 1,952,049.
• Fashion also turns out to be more popular than going green as Fashion Wars and Green Spot appear at numbers 21 and 22 respectively with about a 200,000 install difference.

On another note, it’s surprising to see farming games not take hold on the site, even though they’re popular across the world. On Facebook, Zynga’s FarmVille has boomed to 33.4 million monthly active users in just three months. The difference may be related to the fact that no farming games are currently offered on by top farm game-makers on Facebook, neither Zynga, nor Slashkey, nor Playfish. Smaller apps might have an opportunity here, or perhaps larger companies will move in — or maybe MySpace’s many music and celebrity-loving users want glitzier games than virtual agriculture.

As always, if ever you feel there are some games or apps that should be included on this list, by all means, let us know, and we will be sure to take a look.