The suspicion from when these features initially went live seems half confirmed — the changes Facebook made are not sufficient to substantially curtail the expansion of existing heavyweights, but rather to kill newcomers to the field, which is quite unfortunate — the big get bigger, the Facebook platform becomes more inaccessible to new companies.

Did you do any analysis, or would you consider, out of curiosity, on the impact of these changes specifically to newcomers to the Facebook platform, who can’t rely on existing install base and cross-promotion to spread viral on new games?

We had already made a reference to it in this article, here: “It also comes with the caveat that developer level numbers are not necessarily unique users as a user may play multiple games made by the same developer.”

What you CAN say is that on a game-specific basis, Cafe World lost 727,487 MAU during the period, which is a 2.3% decline. To get the average percent declines ACROSS the Zynga portfolio of apps, I am using the aggregate MAU numbers to come up with -2.8% listed above.

I think this approach is valid for looking at relative change among developers, but it does call out for more discussion of a portfolio effect. Just some quick thoughts:

* Diversification could dampen the impact of the platform changes: Zynga Poker, which is less reliant on viral marketing tactics to the extent sim games are, gained during the period, helping to make up for declines in other games

* If you have a top game driving traffic, declines there could have echo effects on other games that are cross-promoted

Again, thanks for the thoughts and good points.

EVC

Your article is quite insightful, however, I believe the mathematics you are using to calculate the total MAU and DAU for the developers inaccurate based on set logic.

Your summations for MAU and DAU does not account for the overlap of users between products for a particular developer – say Zynga for example. It would be improper to take the gross sum of users across all of their applications and do comparative percentages as they could be statistically inaccurate. In fact, the more games that Zynga adds and since most developers heavily cross-market their products, the probability of the MAU totals containing large amounts of duplicate users becomes greater.

Many of these applications are probably closer to that saturation point which would indicate that the addition of new games is actually not adding much value to the MAU or DAU totals.

Until there is a way to generate aggregate data across all of a developer’s applications removing duplicate users from the count, then all of the counts involving “unique” users shouldn’t be added together and each application should be measured separately.

Since Zynga’s actual monthly count of uniques is more likely closer to 120 million across all of their products, their could be a significant margin of error using MAU “totals”.

Unless I am missing something?