Inside Social Games

In our latest look at the Facebook applications with the most new daily active users (DAU) in the past week, we see an odd trend, according to AppData. Some of the apps that made the list appear to have done so through growth starting around the Thanksgiving holiday, last Thursday. From last Wednesday back through the previous week, we’d seen lower overall gains.

It may be that people were so busy getting ready for Thanksgiving the week before that they didn’t have as much time to log on and play games. Then, with the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, they once again had the time.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Happy Pets	1,906,178	+548,281	+28.76
2.	FishVille	6,806,371	+503,798	+7.40
3.	Birthday Cards	1,225,606	+393,058	+32.07
4.	Hug Me	500,528	+243,830	+48.71
5.	Zoo World	545,615	+199,654	+36.59
6.	Diva Life	205,801	+137,603	+66.86
7.	Fish World	2,370,899	+131,593	+5.55
8.	FarmVille	26,589,135	+130,673	+0.49
9.	Fish Isle	478,146	+125,065	+26.16
10.	Paf le Chien	181,308	+116,055	+64.01
11.	Sorority Life	1,166,854	+112,663	+9.66
12.	Band of Heroes	158,975	+111,597	+70.20
13.	Geo Challenge	169,697	+91,392	+53.86
14.	Fish Life	571,686	+68,526	+11.99
15.	Who Has The Biggest Brain?	146,246	+52,937	+36.20
16.	Poker Rivals	51,028	+50,600	+99.16
17.	FARKLE	1,136,269	+50,148	+4.41
18.	YoVille	3,014,210	+38,368	+1.27
19.	Medical Mayhem	177,903	+37,955	+21.33
20.	Youtopia	48,497	+35,051	+72.27

At the top of the list we have Happy Pets, the latest game by up-and-coming developer CrowdStar: The pet-caring app gained 548,000 new daily users this past week for a total of 1.91 million DAU and 5.77 monthly active users. This places it slightly above Zynga’s big new hit, FishVille, at least in terms of weekly DAU growth.  That app grew by 504,000 DAU, to reach 6.81 million DAU — a big number, to be sure. But as the app has grown to 21.8 million MAU within a few week of launching, it’s inevitable that not all new users who showed up as DAU in their first week of trying the game will still come back daily. Two weeks ago, it had 4.77 million new weekly DAU, and last week it had 1.15 new weekly DAU. This week is likely the longer-term DAU rate, as we discussed earlier today on Inside Social Games.

Among other notable games, we have RockYou new game, Zoo World, which has been climbing up our charts since it launched last month. It grew by nearly 200,000 DAU last week to reach 546,000 DAU.

And, what would a present-day list be without a bunch of fish apps? Besides FishVille, Fish World, Fish Isle and Fish Life all made the list. And, near the bottom, so did some up-and-comers like hospital-themed Medical Mayhem and an interesting new city simulation game called Youtopia.