BackYard Monsters, Crime City and More on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU

A number of older games are scattered throughout this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing games by daily active users, among them FarmVille, YoVille, Social City, Pet Society and Cafe Life. However, it’s probably best to look past those titles — on a timeline longer than a week, none are showing any appreciable growth (most, in fact, are slowly shrinking).

Here’s the full list:

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	FarmVille	17,032,212	+149,827	+0.89%
2.	YoVille	1,031,805	+128,641	+14%
3.	ESPNU College Town	381,210	+127,658	+50%
4.	Millionaire City	2,188,062	+114,984	+6%
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,189,492	+102,205	+2%
6.	Backyard Monsters	499,367	+88,578	+22%
7.	FrontierVille	7,270,764	+88,134	+1%
8.	Crime City	155,355	+84,989	+121%
9.	It Girl	402,670	+77,838	+24%
10.	Social City	617,225	+72,782	+13%
11.	Pet Society	2,332,964	+66,209	+3%
12.	Games	1,349,743	+64,001	+5%
13.	Ninja Saga	1,025,936	+60,155	+6%
14.	Fashion World	1,016,279	+55,795	+6%
15.	Critter Island	175,387	+54,301	+45%
16.	Ikariam – The free browser game	68,276	+49,819	+270%
17.	Cafe Life	491,041	+48,352	+11%
18.	Gourmet Ranch	116,016	+46,771	+68%
19.	Mall World	859,925	+44,864	+6%
20.	Monster World	735,031	+44,302	+6%

ESPNU College Town, the new city-building game from Playdom, is the first game on the list that’s making real strides. It’s followed by Millionaire City, from Digital Chocolate. The two showed up in the same order atop Monday’s monthly active gainer list.

Backyard Monsters, by Casual Collective, is making considerable gains at number six, with 22 percent DAU growth over just a week. The monster-based strategy game has been growing since August, but it may be accelerating somewhat as it crosses half a million daily players.

Crime City is an interesting new hybrid of a Facebook-style RPG with 2.5D graphics and city-building elements, as we covered in our review. It edged out It Girl, the latest from CrowdStar, although the latter is a far larger game overall.

The rest of the list bears a few more newer games that are making genuine gains. There’s also one older game worth noting: Ninja Saga, the long-running anime-inspired RPG, appears to be very slowly adding DAU (over a period of months, not just weeks), which is normally quite difficult for older titles to do.