Strong Growth, Farming Surprises, Among This Week’s Facebook Games with the Most New Daily Actives
December was a slow traffic month for most social game developers, partly because users were busy with other activities during the holidays, and partly because Facebook started stricter enforcement of anti-viral policies at the beginning of the month. But traffic appears to be back on the rise, at least for the 20 games that gained the most new daily active users (DAU) in the past week, according to AppData.
For the week ending December 29, the top 20 games gained a combined total of 2.06 million DAU. This past week, ending on January 5, the top 20 games more than doubled their DAU, gaining 4.10 million.
Top Gainers This Week – Games
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A lot of the usual titles made today’s list, although not in the order one might expect.FishVille, Zynga’s virtual aquarium game launched last fall, is on top, gaining more than half a million new users.
Number two is a surprise, though — Playdom’s new game, Tiki Farm, which had previously been seeing slower growth since launching last month. This past week, it grew by nearly 60 percent, or 376,00 DAU. We’re interested to see how big this title can get.
CrowdStar’s new Happy Island game came in third, gaining 344,00 new DAU, having seen healthy growth over the course of the month.
And while its not surprising to see Zynga’s FarmVille at fourth, right behind it is a title called Country Life — also a farming simulation, but made by a small developer. It has been steadily climbing our leaderboards, and gained 337,000 DAU this past week.
We’ve covered most of the other titles on this list in detail before. A new one that stands out, though, is Garden World, a slick-looking garden-themed iteration of the farming genre. Made by a developer by the name of Tim Saberi Jr. it has rocketed up from nowhere at the start of the new year to reach 175,000 DAU by today. [Update: Tall Tree Games is the developer, and it is cross-promoting the game from its larger Fish World, which helps explain the traffic.]
January 6th, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Garden World is brought to you by the same developers who made Fish World. Cross-promotion in Fish World has helped jump-start the traffic on Garden World so far. Wonder what other worlds we’ll see next…
January 6th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Indeed it is, Eric. Tall Tree Games. Updating the article.
January 8th, 2010 at 12:44 am
Please tell me the correct definition of DAU.
In the case of using the numbers of DAU of this week, what do you mean?
1) The amount of 7day’s active user(unique user)?
or
2) The most number of each 7 day’s active user?
or
3)The avarage number of each 7 day’s active user?
or else?
January 8th, 2010 at 12:54 am
Hi Eric.
Please tell me the definition of the “DAU”.
If we use this word as the DAU of this week,
which do you mean?
1)the total amount of 7days DAU(unique user)
or
2)the most number of each 7day’s DAU
or
3)the avarage number of each 7day’s DAU
or else?
January 8th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Hi Takeshi,
DAU normally refers to “Daily Active User” or the number of people who use a given app on a given day.
Our Top 20 DAU list looks at which apps increased their daily user counts over the course of the last 7 days. So if an app started with 1 million DAU at the start of the week and grew its DAU count to 1.3 million by the end of the week, we’d say it grew its DAU count by 300,000.
-E
January 11th, 2010 at 3:38 am
[...] is a hugely popular game on the even huger social networking site Facebook. How huge? Last month Farmville had over 26m users, and that was a slow Christmas month! Last I checked Facebook had around 300m users, meaning that [...]
January 11th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Thank you Eric.
I got it about DAU. Thanks!
I’m looking forwards to reading your articles every day.