Inside Social Games

In a repeat of last week, the top app on our AppData list of top games by growth in monthly users (Birthday Cards) is not actually a game. And while the remaining entries are mostly games, none picked up more than a million users, which means that overall growth has been a bit slower than usual.

Moreover, there are no fresh names within the top 10; with the exception of two older hits from Zynga, the rest just swapped positions. It’s only starting with number 13, Band of Heroes, that a few new names appear:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Birthday Cards	35,233,051	+5,532,567	+15.70
2.	Pillow Fight	15,973,470	+909,488	+5.69
3.	Tiki Farm	5,531,403	+798,408	+14.43
4.	Happy Island	9,719,942	+707,162	+7.28
5.	Wild Ones	1,674,183	+680,843	+40.67
6.	Mafia Wars	23,807,218	+675,787	+2.84
7.	FarmVille	74,355,776	+495,488	+0.67
8.	Country Life	7,638,333	+480,711	+6.29
9.	Texas HoldEm Poker	24,602,597	+404,850	+1.65
10.	My Town	1,160,646	+384,853	+33.16
11.	開心寶貝	841,649	+300,274	+35.68
12.	Garden World	1,236,287	+283,300	+22.92
13.	Band of Heroes	828,453	+249,510	+30.12
14.	what are you born to do?	1,753,281	+206,328	+11.77
15.	Blessings†	190,534	+174,415	+91.54
16.	DRIVe Around The World	377,900	+143,071	+37.86
17.	Café World	30,068,471	+142,662	+0.47
18.	IQ test	1,427,810	+124,178	+8.70
19.	Sanalika	259,835	+122,108	+46.99
20.	Temple of Mahjong 2	412,195	+117,627	+28.54

Pillow Fight, an embellished “poke” app, was last week’s top game, but it decelerated from almost three million new users to less than a million to land in the number two spot here. The drop in growth for Tiki Farm, Happy Island, Wild Ones and (a bit lower) Country Life was a bit less severe, so they’ve shifted little since a week ago.

The Zynga games that muscled onto the list hold the sixth, seventh and ninth spots: Mafia Wars, FarmVille and Texas HoldEm Poker. These games are so huge that the “growth” they’re experiencing is really just minor fluctuations in their user bases. And to round out the top ten, take note of  My Town, the game that is making Broken Bulb Studios a new success: its growth has been quite steady, as seen below.

So much for the top spots. Next up is 開心寶貝, a Chinese-language game that has been charging ahead. It gathered 50,000 more new users than last week and moved up five places in the rankings. Two places below is Band of Heroes, which as we mentioned above is new to the list.

DRIVe Around The World, an app built by Volvo, modifies the concept of six degrees of connection to pass a virtual item around to friends as close to 1,333km away as possible. Finally, Sanalika and Temple of Mahjong 2 bring up the caboose; the former is in Turkish, while the latter, if in English, has a very Chinese theme.