Inside Social Games

Smaller games are prominent on this week’s list of Facebook games gaining the most daily active users (DAU), from AppData. Starting with number three, 開心寶貝, fully 13 of the entries have under half a million total DAU.

Among those same games, there are also several repeat visitors to the list, suggesting that they won’t remain small for long. Here are all 20:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Bejeweled Blitz	3,038,124	+231,139	+7.61
2.	Zoo World	2,167,734	+159,973	+7.38
3.	開心寶貝	476,028	+150,155	+31.54
4.	My Town	486,796	+100,763	+20.70
5.	Happy Island	2,919,892	+96,184	+3.29
6.	Mafia Wars	6,712,908	+81,514	+1.21
7.	Wild Ones	326,413	+77,235	+23.66
8.	(Lil) Farm Life	998,748	+72,478	+7.26
9.	Jewel Puzzle II	67,640	+67,621	+99.97
10.	Gangster City	220,909	+62,673	+28.37
11.	MindJolt Games	2,513,204	+55,954	+2.23
12.	Go to Hell	55,153	+54,564	+98.93
13.	Little Warrior	238,319	+47,320	+19.86
14.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	68,271	+41,914	+61.39
15.	Texas HoldEm Poker	5,665,925	+31,742	+0.56
16.	Little Rock Pool	93,399	+27,278	+29.21
17.	Medical Mayhem	216,179	+22,932	+10.61
18.	SuperPocus	37,100	+19,610	+52.86
19.	Kingdoms of Camelot	142,402	+19,532	+13.72
20.	Fashion City	19,308	+18,313	+94.85

The board’s leader, Bejeweled Blitz by Popcap, has actually lost over half a million monthly users in the past month. But the game’s stickiness has risen slightly; about four percent more of the game’s users visit on a daily basis now. Number two, RockYou’s Zoo World, has been on a sharp upward trajectory for the month, though not as much as its sister app Birthday Cards, which it is partially integrated into.

The Chinese-language game 開心寶貝 (Happy Baby) is notable for more than its steady week-over-week growth. Quite a few of the game’s monthly users are also daily users (see below) — more so than most English-language games, whose DAU tends to hover at or below 30 percent of MAU.

My Town continues to do quite well, also. In its early days, this game appeared on our top 20 lists with Ninja Warz, the other significantly-sized game from developer Broken Bulb Studios. But Ninja Warz has fallen away, while My Town, a sim-town game, appears to have gotten a firm foothold among players.

Continuing down, there’s Mafia Wars and a bit further, Texas HoldEm Poker; these two huge Zynga games never seem to gain much at once, but both have gained pretty steadily since the holidays. And below Mafia Wars, you’ll notice Gangster City, a similar challenger from Playfish with strong prospects. But it looks like the game may be having trouble hanging onto players; we’ll have a better idea of that next week.