Inside Social Games

When we compared this month’s Facebook Top 25 to our first release last December, the growth was astounding. Question is now: How did MySpace do? As we have noted in the past, on Inside Facebook, MySpace has hindered its own platform by not providing clear monthly active user counts for games.

Nonetheless, we do at least have the number of installs, which we can use to get a loose sense of how many new users the games are adding over time. While the top game, Mobsters (from Playdom), hasn’t changed much — it has 14.1 million total users today versus 13.0 million before — the average number of installs across the board certainly has. If you were not in the top ten 11 months ago, you had under 2 million installs a month. Now, the majority of top 25 games on the list have at least around 2 million installs, running all the way down to #20 (Heroes) with 1.9 million. Even those that rank from #20-#25 have seen their average number of installs quadruple. Nearly a year ago, the #25 spot, My Green Garden, held 370,702 installations. Now, the #25 spot, Bloodlines, holds 1,594,092.

Here are the highlights from this past month:

• The Mobsters game sits tight at #1 with over 14 million installs while Zynga has continued to grow with almost 13 million.
• Playdom’s Bumper Stickers app remains at #3 gaining 178,040 more installations, over last month’s report, with Own Your Friends coming up behind it with a growth of about 27,000.
• “Gambling” still proves more popular than the non-mafia role playing games, as Texas HoldEm Poker stays above, at #5, the Zynga virtual world, YoVille, and its RPGs, Vampires and Street Racing (#8, #9, and #10 respectively).
• Tag Me from BitRhymes and Kiss Me from Playdom swap places to #11 and #13 respectively, as Cheers!!, also from BitRhymes, remains at #12 with 3.8 million installations. Curiously, as we saw last month, the app still doesn’t show up in the app gallery.
• Sorority Girls appear to be more popular that poker as Sorority Life beats out Poker Palace for the #14 spot by a scant margin of roughly 24,000.
• Finally, last month’s newcomer, Whats my Impression on friends, from BitRhymes, earned 1.7 million installs, moving up from #24 to #22. Green Spot, however, falls to #24, as it has been overtaken by What My Friends Think About Me.

Though it is difficult to see accurately, MySpace has indeed grown since 2008. The exact amount is obviously obscured, but with four times the number of installs now in the lower ranked titles than last year, overall growth cannot be denied. Nevertheless, if there is any one difference that signifies a different evolution than from Facebook, it is the significant lack of new titles that appear on this list month after month and the absence of international applications. MySpace traffic fell, year over year, to 65.7 million users in September, according to comScore, and from our understanding it has a similar number of users outside the US. But the company also has a range of new initiatives planned, including ones for gaming, we hear and hope. Stay tuned for more.