Inside Social Games

There’s a new gang in town, but instead of tearing the place down, they seem to want to build it up. This week’s AppData list of most rapidly growing games still under a million players is ruled over by a set of town-building games, although a few other interesting entrants also made it on.

Besides the new faces, there are a few notable absences. Where is Gangster City, and what happened to Little Warrior and Band of Heroes? You won’t see them here; Playfish’s Gangster City is the standout, with over 100 percent growth during the week to 1.1 million players, but the others have also passed the fateful mark.

Here’s the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	My City Life	698,494	+535,098	+76.61
2.	Truth about friends	523,925	+523,784	+99.97
3.	Go to Hell	273,931	+257,768	+94.10
4.	MiniPlanet	558,648	+221,714	+39.69
5.	Sanalika	501,359	+147,149	+29.35
6.	Kingdoms of Camelot	670,480	+133,490	+19.91
7.	Jumping Dog	108,671	+108,655	+99.99
8.	Funflow	101,589	+101,414	+99.83
9.	Flowers for Friends	503,076	+100,625	+20.00
10.	SPP Ranch!	186,246	+89,777	+48.20
11.	Cité des nuages	618,950	+84,752	+13.69
12.	Spot The Difference	568,182	+81,769	+14.39
13.	COLLAPSE!	955,478	+77,955	+8.16
14.	Ninja Warz	874,625	+72,530	+8.29
15.	Street Rides	149,536	+65,715	+43.95
16.	SuperPocus	202,272	+65,242	+32.25
17.	Zapapa	185,326	+60,583	+32.69
18.	Social Pang	174,760	+55,756	+31.90
19.	Roulette Madness	132,832	+49,514	+37.28
20.	Happy Slots!	192,538	+47,450	+24.64

My City Life almost sounds more like an app for scheduling bouts of heavy drinking than a game. Its developer is an unknown, but the game appears fairly well built, if along standard lines; you start off with a handful of houses and an abbreviated strip of road and build from there, with the usual entreaties to invite friends.

It’s in good company with two games following close behind: MiniPlanet and Kingdoms of Camelot. There’s a bit of a “Sims” vibe going in the former, while the latter lets you enjoy the pseudo-slavery of medieval serfdom, with quests and fighting thrown in.

Number three is Go to Hell, a promotion for the new console game Dante’s Inferno. The gameplay on Inferno, by the way, is pretty great; but the Facebook game is a bit of a single-joke throwaway on the theme of sending friends and various Facebook Pages “to hell”. Players, not to be fooled, seem to mostly be sampling and moving on.

There’s one more worth mentioning: Funflow, at number eight. This isn’t a game, exactly; it’s instead a social gaming app built for game discovery and score keeping. It’s built by King.com, one of the internet’s larger gaming portals, which is apparently trying to find its way onto Facebook.