Inside Social Games

Last week was notably good for smaller games and game developers, juding by our top 20 growing apps list. The most obvious “small app” is Zynga’s FishVille, which we’ve covered separately as it grew by an impressive 8.24 million monthly active users last week to reach 9.24 million.

Considering FishVille is from the largest developer on the platform — and the one with the most cross-promotional power as well as money for advertising, let’s take a look at some smaller ones. Next on the list is Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar, a relatively small developer but an already-big app: It gained 1.93 million to reach 27.0 million monthly actives, on the same trajectory as pst weeks.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FishVille	9,238,698	+8,237,776	+89.17
2.	Happy Aquarium	27,054,550	+1,930,762	+7.14
3.	FarmVille	64,606,716	+902,322	+1.40
4.	Diva Life	1,589,777	+796,317	+50.09
5.	Island Paradise	6,085,569	+750,521	+12.33
6.	Little Warrior	2,324,123	+674,042	+29.00
7.	Yakuza Lords	1,229,559	+468,293	+38.09
8.	Farmville Gifts	427,577	+401,200	+93.83
9.	Fish Life	1,611,848	+389,427	+24.16
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	19,201,295	+323,468	+1.68
11.	Snowball Fight	335,255	+303,988	+90.67
12.	Roller Coaster Kingdom	15,426,497	+302,012	+1.96
13.	Band of Heroes	436,604	+293,784	+67.29
14.	Mobsters 2: Vendetta	4,774,524	+280,863	+5.88
15.	Castle Age	2,167,708	+262,495	+12.11
16.	Snowball Fight!	548,043	+228,216	+41.64
17.	Pet Society	21,813,174	+209,564	+0.96
18.	Piou Piou contre les cactus	274,005	+177,025	+64.61
19.	Rock Riot	1,330,683	+167,895	+12.62
20.	The Hierarchy	265,700	+166,586	+62.70

At number four, we have the first of three games on today’s chart from LOLapps: role-playing game Diva Life, which grew by 796,000 last week to reach 1.59 million monthly actives. LOLapps has been cooking up a range of RPG games lately, with Yakuza Lords and Band of Heroes also appearing further down on today’s list. Note that the latter two also made our up-and-comers list last Friday; that list looks at the top growing apps with between 100,000 and 1 million users, so clearly, and Yakuza Lords has since moved up into the AppData big leagues. On a design level, these games distinguish themselves not so much through the game mechanics but by having slick images and story lines, which something that cannot be said for some of the other RPGs on Facebook.

Down the list, we have Island Paradise, a farming-style simulation game from Neopets creator Meteor Games — it also showed up last week. And, we have Little Warrior, a basic arcade-style game that also showed up last week.

And another interesting one is FarmVille Gifts, which contrary to what the name suggests, is not made by Zynga. Instead, the app lets you send FarmVille-themed gifts to your friends but “NOT,” as the app makes clear, to your friends in FarmVille. This looks exactly like a trademark violation, to say the least. As we noted when we spotted the app in our up-and-comers list last week, we’re surprised it has not been shut down yet.

Finally, Slide’s Rock Riot and Serious Business’ The Hierarchy have both pushed their way on to the list.