Inside Social Games

Post-holidays, our weekly AppData list of top gaining games by daily active users (DAU) seemed full of familiar names, as players who had stopped playing to vacation returned to their old favorites and developers took a break. It’s time to declare that effect completely over, as this week’s list welcomes no less than 11 new entrants.

Take a look below. Note that one reason the games dominating the bottom half made it onto the list is that overall traffic is running low; the gainers in the same spots last week had gotten about twice as many new DAUs.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	28,417,879	+936,658	+3.30
2.	Mafia Wars	6,631,394	+562,689	+8.49
3.	Gangster City	158,236	+158,093	+99.91
4.	Little Warrior	190,999	+150,020	+78.54
5.	Birthday Cards	2,432,037	+144,741	+5.95
6.	Happy Island	2,823,708	+134,818	+4.77
7.	PetVille	4,694,108	+114,709	+2.44
8.	My Town	386,033	+92,975	+24.08
9.	開心寶貝	325,873	+83,673	+25.68
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	5,634,183	+78,186	+1.39
11.	UNO™	284,511	+64,368	+22.62
12.	Garden World	301,909	+39,981	+13.24
13.	開心水族箱	1,726,815	+33,775	+1.96
14.	Treasure Madness	930,223	+32,865	+3.53
15.	Hug Me	290,018	+32,657	+11.26
16.	MiniPlanet	79,671	+30,026	+37.69
17.	Kingdoms of Camelot	122,870	+25,531	+20.78
18.	Vegas Slots	30,054	+25,332	+84.29
19.	Country Life	2,412,524	+24,324	+1.01
20.	Okey	446,095	+21,692	+4.86

Starting at the top, you can disregard FarmVille; its userbase looks flat over a longer average timespan. But Mafia Wars, another older Zynga game, has enough of a bump in DAU to suggests it may be having another wind.

That’s less interesting, though, than the rest of the list, from number three, Gangster City, on down. For the sake of convenience, we’ll show the smaller games that made the list again below. You’re looking at a subsection of the above list: 3-4, 11, and 16-18.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
3.	Gangster City	158,236	+158,093	+99.91
4.	Little Warrior	190,999	+150,020	+78.54
11.	UNO™	284,511	+64,368	+22.62
16.	MiniPlanet	79,671	+30,026	+37.69
17.	Kingdoms of Camelot	122,870	+25,531	+20.78
18.	Vegas Slots	30,054	+25,332	+84.29

Despite appearances, these games aren’t brand new, with the sole exception of Gangster City, which was just released by Playfish. Instead, they’re games released a month or more ago that are suddenly receiving interest.

Will they continue growing? Since these games also aren’t backed up by big-developer firepower, there’s no telling. The only two recognizable names in the lot are UNO developer GameHouse, which also does Scrabble Worldwide but isn’t terribly successful, and Watercooler, which makes Kingdoms of Camelot and a whole heap of lightly trafficked sports fan apps.

Chances are, another crop of new names will appear on next week’s DAU list. But buried in this week’s list is probably a future winner — the trick is just predicting which one.