Inside Social Games

Overall gains in daily active users (DAU) have recovered after the dip we noted last week, led by FarmVille and Playdom’s new game, Social City. This is our weekly AppData list of leading Facebook games by growth in DAU.

FarmVille has shown steady growth in monthly active users for several weeks, but its DAU gains have been unsteady. The Zynga game still hasn’t reached an all-time high in DAU, but it has returned to the point it was at a couple weeks back, with over 30 million DAU.

Here are the rest of the list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	30,806,872	+2,103,410	+6.83
2.	Social City	1,239,331	+1,239,240	+99.99
3.	Restaurant City	3,670,846	+358,434	+9.76
4.	Pet Society	4,304,155	+310,402	+7.21
5.	Bubble Island	504,192	+259,995	+51.57
6.	YoVille	2,132,214	+191,937	+9.00
7.	Tiki Resort	427,563	+178,463	+41.74
8.	Jeux Gratuits	166,892	+165,108	+98.93
9.	Happy Aquarium	4,693,053	+155,957	+3.32
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,305,568	+128,394	+2.04
11.	Zoo Paradise	122,571	+117,895	+96.19
12.	Farm Town	2,455,361	+91,518	+3.73
13.	My Town	801,063	+91,023	+11.36
14.	Mahjongg Dimensions	195,090	+74,702	+38.29
15.	Sunshine Ranch	560,495	+60,194	+10.74
16.	Towner	127,192	+47,490	+37.34
17.	Fish World	1,095,925	+39,763	+3.63
18.	Wild Ones	321,013	+34,496	+10.75
19.	Live Games	40,721	+33,849	+83.12
20.	Country Story	1,110,220	+30,612	+2.76

Social City’s DAU gains are impressive, although the stat is likely inflated by brand-new players. But the new Playdom game, isn’t alone, either; two of its peers in the SimCity genre, My Town and Towner also made it into the top 20 this week. As a category, these games have been taking off since we wrote about them three weeks back; we also reviewed Social City last week.

Restaurant City and Pet Society, both from Electronic Arts, are both well-established, slower-growing games that are showing recent bumps in DAU. It’s hard to tell at the moment, but they may lose some of their gains by next week. YoVille, by Zynga, also shows a bump in DAU, despite its ongoing loss of monthly active users.

Bubble Island and Tiki Resort, by comparison, are both more recent games, from wooga and Playdom respectively. They’ve also both hit this list more than one week running, driven by strong growth and good player retention. We’ll expect to see these two in coming weeks, as well.

Finally, skip over the next four games to Farm Town, the Slashkey game that started the Facebook farming craze. It’s interesting to see it appear here; Slashkey has been losing players since Zynga showed up with FarmVille. But although it’s continuing to shed occasional players, the game appears to be shoring up its regular player base.