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By Chris Morrison 2 Comments »

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.

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

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2 Responses to “Small Games Make It Big on This Week’s List of Top Gainers by New Daily Users”

  1. Flavio Rump Says:

    If you look at the actual appdata graphs you can see that neither the growth of vegas slots nor the one of little warrior are organic.
    they are actually declining slowly.
    So the growth you see are either large ad buys or other cross promotion going on.

    http://www.appdata.com/facebook/apps/index/id/155122281668
    http://www.appdata.com/facebook/apps/index/id/183392727666

  2. This Week’s Headlines on Inside Social Games Says:

    [...] Small Games Make It Big on This Week’s List of Top Gainers by New Daily Users [...]

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