Playfish Replaces Zynga Atop This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

Last week, Zynga’s Poker Blitz led our list of emerging Facebook games still under a million monthly active users. This week, Blitz has graduated on, and it is Hotel City, by Electronic Arts subsidiary Playfish, that leads off. But besides coming from two of the largest social gaming companies around, the two couldn’t be more different; Blitz is a card game, while Hotel City has players manage their own virtual hotel.

As we note over at Inside Facebook, another week could see Hotel City among EA’s top five properties. Unlike Zynga, EA only has a couple of really big hits; all Hotel City has to do is pass 1.4 million players to beat Who Has The Biggest Brain?, an aging Playfish brain-training game.

Here’s the full list:

Top Gainers This Week – Games
Name MAU Gain↓ Gain, %
1. icon Hotel City 752,444 +676,357 +888.93
2. icon Family Feud 336,606 +271,987 +420.91
3. icon Send Free Farmville Gifts 392,015 +246,544 +169.48
4. icon Ameba Pico 734,762 +240,557 +48.68
5. icon Bola 975,372 +219,498 +29.04
6. icon PoxNora 468,350 +197,235 +72.75
7. icon RockFREE 198,688 +142,938 +256.39
8. icon Glamble Poker 952,317 +135,610 +16.60
9. icon 武俠風雲 156,097 +127,644 +448.61
10. icon Island Life 537,197 +112,501 +26.49
11. icon My Tribe 129,366 +110,238 +576.32
12. icon NanoTowns 351,357 +108,562 +44.71
13. icon Aquarium Life 583,235 +103,603 +21.60
14. icon Keyboard SMASH! 129,600 +96,606 +292.80
15. icon Puzzle Bobble 831,947 +92,174 +12.46
16. icon Fish Friends 155,337 +86,808 +126.67
17. icon Fashion City 316,169 +76,804 +32.09
18. icon Daily Tarot Cards 100,408 +74,389 +285.90
19. icon Mall World 131,841 +73,496 +125.97
20. icon Garden Life 766,169 +70,438 +10.12

Family Feud is part game, part quiz show. Players seem to be gravitating to the 80s nostalgia of Feud, ably recreated by iWin, Inc. and Backstage, with most of the players in the game’s two-week run showing up last week.

Send Free Farmville Gifts is, of course, just a scam capitalizing on FarmVille’s name. It’s followed by a pair of foreign-made games. Ameba Pico, by CyberAgent, is of Japanese origin, while Bola, a soccer team management game, is by Argentina’s Three Melons. Of course, Three Melons is technically of dual nationality now, since Playdom just bought the company.

PoxNora, a turn-based strategy game by Sony Online Entertainment, is picking up in terms of MAU, but the game’s DAU is dismal; only four percent of monthly users return daily. It could be that players who really enjoy the game are dropping Facebook’s clunky Flash implementation for the downloadable version, which is a bit smoother.

Skipping down a few places to numbers 10 and 11 we find Island Life and My Tribe, which share more than a few similarities. Both are set on islands, for instance, and both involve the usual farming and time management techniques. More importantly, they’re both games by well-known casual gaming companies that got a slow start on Facebook, respectively Metaplace and Big Fish Games. We reviewed them here and here.

AppData - Facebook application stats and data from Inside Network

7 Responses to Playfish Replaces Zynga Atop This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

  1. Matt Mihaly says:

    Not sure this list is correct. Where’s Music Pets, for instance? It’s gained hundreds of thousands of MAUs this last week.

  2. Chris Morrison says:

    Matt — this list only shows games that are still under a million MAU. Music Pets actually crossed that mark by the time I wrote the post. It’s at 1.1 million now.

    http://www.appdata.com/facebook/apps/index/id/138537242716

  3. aljo says:

    okey la an aba

  4. jose andres says:

    hola a todos me pueden ayudar o decir como me puedo ganar playfish en pet society

  5. JC says:

    Hi guys, just a small comment: you said “Of course, Three Melons is technically of dual nationality now, since Playdom just bought the company for $5 million”, but $5 million was the amount Playdom invested in Metrogames. According to your link, I think the terms on the Three Melons deal were not disclosed.

  6. Chris Morrison says:

    Thanks JC, you’re right about that. Looks like we already fixed the details.

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