Inside Social Games

Christmas apps stick together on this weeks emerging games list while three high-quality games from big developers take the top spots, according to AppData.

This week’s emerging list shows the top 20 games that ended with between 100,000 to 1 million users on December 17, and gained the most users in the previous seven days. It is a way to see which small games are getting big.

New players keep Ponzi, Inc. growing, expanding its MAU last week by 49 percent and with 726,421 users. It is likely to move off this list soon. Same for Poker Rivals and Top Fish. These apps swim in popular waters (pardon) but build users at a slow though continuous rate. Poker Rivals by Playfish expanded by 37 percent but dropping in DAU’s by about 30,000 since Dec. 8. Meanwhile, Top Fish by Slide, Inc. expanded by 42 percent.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Ponzi, Inc.	726,421	+354,187	+48.76
2.	Poker Rivals	900,181	+331,733	+36.85
3.	Top Fish	556,464	+231,588	+41.62
4.	Youtopia	509,619	+200,721	+39.39
5.	Bubble Popp	363,126	+189,960	+52.31
6.	COLLAPSE!	564,991	+151,462	+26.81
7.	Happy Habitat	279,742	+115,552	+41.31
8.	Say Merry Christmas	156,786	+112,644	+71.85
9.	Christmas Friends Tree	174,844	+107,819	+61.67
10.	Fairyland	759,500	+104,252	+13.73
11.	Bite Me	254,686	+97,327	+38.21
12.	Songs	838,229	+95,399	+11.38
13.	Ninja Warz	444,720	+94,105	+21.16
14.	Minigolf Party	998,048	+88,353	+8.85
15.	GooBox – Giochi gratuiti	354,559	+82,634	+23.31
16.	Christmas Countdown	176,906	+76,631	+43.32
17.	Christmas Video	121,049	+75,090	+62.03
18.	Chug It!	839,536	+72,067	+8.58
19.	Wild Ones	291,699	+67,850	+23.26
20.	Candy Cane	189,427	+58,878	+31.08

The highest ranking Christmas game was Say Merry Christmas at eighth and followed by Christmas Friends Tree at ninth which tied with Christmas Video, seventeenth, for highest gain percentage of any games this week, at 62 percent. For Tree, that translates to 108,000 new players, and for Video it counts for about 75,000. We should note that many of these Christmas “games” are games in name only; the apps are quite simple, and not very game-like, yet their developers have for whatever reason marked them as “games” within Facebook’s application directory.

Christmas Video shared its spot near the end of the list with other Christmas game Christmas Countdown, sixteenth to Video’s seventeenth. And, out at twentieth, Candy Cane makes its first appearance on the up and coming list, raising 31 percent for a monthly active user base of 189,427 players. Candy Cane is also the only holiday themed game on the list that was released this year, let alone this month, so while the others have word of mouth, Candy Cane is building slowly and may have an even stronger year, next holiday season.

Overall the up-and-coming games could be divided this week as five Christmas, five care/pet games,  two management simulations and two puzzle titles with the other six appearing in other genre’s like Minigolf Party, thirteenth, and Ninja Warz, fourteenth.