Inside Social Games

While Facebook releases monthly engagement numbers, MySpace unfortunately does not. Nevertheless, we’re still going to take our monthly look at the MySpace top 25 by total installs. While the Facebook Platform is evolving quickly with new international developers, it’s tough to see what’s happening this month on MySpace. The top 25 is predominantly text-based role-playing games.

As far as this month goes, Playdom and Zynga retain their top spots along with veterans like BitRhymes and RockYou. The highlights:

• Mobsters, from Playdom, remains at #1, but with Zynga’s Mafia Wars garnering more new installs this month (132,571), it continues a gradual closure of the gap between the two games. The question is whether or not that trend will continue.
• Zynga’s Texas Hold’Em Poker sits pretty at #5 with over 6 million installs, but has been renamed “Zynga Poker.” However, we decided to keep the old name for the time being for clarity’s sake.
• Cheers!! from BitRhymes is another curious app. It strongly holds the #12 spot, yet for some reason it no longer appears in the MySpace app gallery.
• Poker Palace loses out to Tag Me with 3,233,437 installs to 3,505,163 respectively.
• The relatively new Grong! friend quiz, What My Friends Think About Me moves up to #23 ousting Friend Factory.
• As a matter of fact, Friend Factory disappears completely as a newcomer, “Whats my Impression on friends” from BitRhymes appears at #24 with 1.5 million installs, followed by Playdom’s Bloodlines at #25.

Despite the lack of current engagement numbers, developers are still reporting strong monetization metrics within MySpace apps. If you have more data to share with us on engagement within social games on MySpace, please get in touch with us!