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Café World (20M), Roller Coaster Kingdom (10M), FarmVille (60M) in Top 20 Growing Games This Week
October 19th, 2009
| By Eric Eldon | 6 Comments » |
Café World, Zynga’s new virtual restaurant game, has hit 20 million users as of today, according to our AppData service. It added almost 10 million in the last week, alone — it only launched at the beginning of the month, so this the fastest growth we’ve ever seen from a social game. And, of course, the app came in at the top of our list of the 20 gaming apps that gained the most users last week on Facebook.
Another Zynga title, Roller Coaster Kingdom, has also boomed. It actually launched at the beginning of August, and by Zynga’s standards had been growing relatively slowly. In fact, it was actually losing traffic in September, falling from a high of 4.45 million to as low as 3.84 million.
But earlier this month, something changed, and the game has since gained nearly 6 million users, including 4 million in the last week. What changed? We’re not completely sure, but on October 5th, Zynga added the app to its toolbar — meaning users playing extremely popular games like FarmVille will see it along with Zynga’s other apps in a panel at the top of the screen. Roller Coaster Kingdom came in at number three on our list this week.
| Name | MAU | Gain |
Gain, % | Developer | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |  |
Café World | 20,059,325 | +9,960,741 | +98.6 | Zynga |
| 2. |  |
FarmVille | 60,322,759 | +4,200,352 | +7.5 | Zynga |
| 3. |  |
Roller Coaster Kingdom | 10,407,600 | +4,074,512 | +64.3 | Zynga |
| 4. |  |
Bejeweled Blitz | 8,715,030 | +1,026,693 | +13.4 | Popcap Games |
| 5. |  |
Restaurant City | 17,074,872 | +874,468 | +5.4 | Playfish |
| 6. |  |
YoVille | 19,768,369 | +851,240 | +4.5 | Zynga |
| 7. |  |
Pet Society | 20,281,917 | +769,682 | +3.9 | Playfish |
| 8. |  |
(Lil) Farm Life | 5,444,328 | +706,635 | +14.9 | Greenpatch Inc |
| 9. |  |
Country Story | 7,941,959 | +516,180 | +7.0 | Playfish |
| 10. |  |
Animal Paradise | 3,740,008 | +429,416 | +13.0 | Rekoo |
| 11. |  |
開心農場 | 4,163,861 | +402,817 | +10.7 | ELEX |
| 12. |  |
Brain Buddies | 5,770,139 | +391,908 | +7.3 | wooga – world of gaming |
| 13. |  |
Mobsters 2: Vendetta | 3,306,320 | +339,812 | +11.5 | Playdom |
| 14. |  |
Sorority Life | 6,985,708 | +331,167 | +5.0 | Playdom |
| 15. |  |
Texas HoldEm Poker | 18,382,983 | +290,384 | +1.6 | Zynga |
| 16. |  |
MindJolt Games | 15,120,681 | +289,720 | +2.0 | MindJolt |
| 17. |  |
Sunshine Ranch | 2,295,587 | +264,882 | +13.0 | Rekoo |
| 18. |  |
Icy Tower | 347,158 | +251,184 | +261.7 | Free Lunch Design |
| 19. |  |
Castle Age | 1,447,758 | +187,866 | +14.9 | Castle Age |
| 20. |  |
Forever Friends | 969,366 | +161,120 | +19.9 | Martin Wee |
Speaking of FarmVille, it was at number two on the list, gaining 4.20 million to reach 60.3 million monthly active users.
But, despite Zynga’s success, there are plenty of other notable apps growing on the platform this week. At number four is Bejeweled Blitz, from Popcap Games — the company is a decade old, and has historically been focused on casual games. But it has spent the last year building social games, and raised its first round of funding ever only recently to try to push that effort harder. Bejeweled, based on the company’s casual puzzle game of of the same name, grew 1.03 million to reach 8.72 million monthly actives this past week. That’s is a good sign for the company.
Playfish, which has had a popular virtual food-vending game called Restaurant City for months, is also coming along well. Its app grew by 874,000 users this past week to reach 17.1 million. Yes, it got passed by Café World last week, but it is still hanging in there — and at number five on the list. Also, actually, Playfish’s virtual farming game, Country Story, is also doing relatively well. It grew by a respectable 516,000 to reach 7.94 million monthly actives.
Also notable this week are the successes of Asia-based simulation games. Animal Paradise and Sunshine Ranch from Beijing-based developer Rekoo each gained hundreds of thousands of users, as did 開心農場 (“Happy Farm”) by ELEX.
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October 19th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Well, it’s pretty obvious how Zinga games “suddenly” gain users – they BUY them!
Zynga puts TONS of money into aggressive advertising, where as playfish relays much more on virality.
If you’ll look on AppData graph for Cafe world you’d see they started with 30 users (30/9), next day it was 2k, next day around 39K, next 265K – and then, “suddenly” 1.7M new users every day.
It’s not that virality makes Cafe world so popular, Zynga BUYS users with insane amount of cash, brings it to a high ranking position and THEN, when 20M users, obviously virality is a big factor.
Playfish grow MUCH slower, but not because their games are any less better (and like most of the people in the industry, I too think playfish is SO much better than Zynga as a game developer) – but because they grow much more based on virality, they don’t spend so much money on advertising, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover, per game they are even more profitable than Zynga.
October 21st, 2009 at 9:10 pm
[...] Estoy impresionado de ver como, en tan poco tiempo, la tendencia de las aplicaciones y los juegos sociales ha crecido. Tal parece que hasta, por más sociales y potencialmente internacionales, existe regionalidad en cada uno de ellos, una importante diferencia con respecto a las consolas. Por ejemplo, en México, Farmville crece exponencialmente y recibo constantemente invitaciones o leo movimientos en walls de mis perfiles. Sin embargo, de Cafe World solo he recibido una, con todo y que es el juego más popular a nivel global, con más de 20 millones de usuarios. [...]
October 26th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
[...] affected Café World’s stats, if not other apps. Yet we’ve noticed something larger: The top 20 list gained 26.3 million total MAU last week, but only 9.42 million this [...]
October 27th, 2009 at 6:01 am
[...] a handful of problems, however, Icy Tower is off to a good start. As we’ve covered on our Top 20 up-and-coming games list, the game gainedmore than 250,000 users recently week, and currently has 527,000 MAUs. Suffice to [...]
November 4th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
growing games
November 8th, 2009 at 3:39 am
i want to game farmville……..