Big Slowdown Across Most of This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
Every once in a while, a week will come along in which Facebook app growth inexplicably falls by half or more. That’s the case on this week’s list of fastest-gaining Facebook games by monthly-active users, but there are still several trends that we can dig out.
The most notable is that Treasure Isle and Hotel City both seem to be heading for a plateau. Zynga’s Isle had already begun slowing by the time we wrote last week that it had passed Mafia Wars. It will likely become a bit larger over the next couple weeks, but very few apps have ever topped the 30 million MAU mark by much, with FarmVille being the notable exception.
As for Hotel City, the evidence that it’s leveling off isn’t as certain. But it, too is crossing a threshold. Aside from Isle, the previous top-growing game of the year was Social City, which appears to have maxed out around 12.5 million players.
Here’s our AppData top 20 list for the past week:
| Name | MAU | Gain![]() |
Gain, % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | 25,608,814 | +3,811,925 | +17.49 | |
| 2. | 13,201,385 | +1,542,779 | +13.23 | |
| 3. | 3,652,686 | +749,842 | +25.83 | |
| 4. | 1,999,058 | +564,252 | +39.33 | |
| 5. | 6,246,592 | +403,685 | +6.91 | |
| 6. | 2,451,248 | +364,423 | +17.46 | |
| 7. | 4,738,486 | +258,281 | +5.76 | |
| 8. | 561,586 | +252,674 | +81.79 | |
| 9. | 1,719,409 | +200,109 | +13.17 | |
| 10. | 1,152,393 | +144,074 | +14.29 | |
| 11. | 367,489 | +141,816 | +62.84 | |
| 12. | 138,730 | +132,061 | +1,980.22 | |
| 13. | 1,262,746 | +125,928 | +11.08 | |
| 14. | 170,015 | +105,768 | +164.63 | |
| 15. | 541,987 | +103,143 | +23.50 | |
| 16. | 248,573 | +94,783 | +61.63 | |
| 17. | 221,334 | +92,794 | +72.19 | |
| 18. | 247,843 | +91,528 | +58.55 | |
| 19. | 1,318,877 | +85,086 | +6.90 | |
| 20. | 463,211 | +83,540 | +22.00 |
Family Feud and Mall World, at numbers three and four, show less evidence of a decline. Feud’s gain is only a couple hundred thousand MAU lower than the week before. As for Mall World, the girly-girl shopping game is still in the prime of its growth, and from here we expect it to pick up a couple million more MAUs.
Playdom’s Tiki Resort is that company’s dark horse, showing a longer and steadier growth trajectory than most other games we see; it has been headed up since its late February release. Underneath Tiki, our list heads into newer-growth territory, even if all the games themselves aren’t new: that list includes Kingdoms of Camelot, Battle Punks, Bola and My Tribe, as well as several others.
And because growth was so low overall for the past week — averaging about exactly half of growth on the previous week — with titles like Bubble Island and Garden Life having dropped off entirely, there are some brand-new games that have also broken in. Big City Life is another Playdom title, just released, while Nightclub City is a spiritual cousin by an independent developer; we’ve reviewed both, here and here.
Jungle Life, meanwhile, is from Metrogames, which Playdom has a $5 million investment in. We’ll cover it in more depth later this week, but the basic idea is that it’s yet another animal-collecting game, this time set in a jungle.




May 3rd, 2010 at 10:16 am
Facebook changes are to blame for this. Also Facebooks servers routinely fail.
May 3rd, 2010 at 9:21 pm
@zilch – I’ve never had a problem with facebook.. though you DO realize games on the facebook platform are not actually HOSTED on facebook servers right?
They are hosted by 3rd parties.. think ServerBeach for example.
May 9th, 2010 at 10:05 am
[...] Big Slowdown Across Most of This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU [...]
September 23rd, 2010 at 12:03 pm
[...] appeal, it seems that social games are here to stay for a good long time. But I also wonder if the slowdown and churn we’ve seen in social games this year indicates a certain weariness on the part of players. [...]