Familiar Titles Dominate This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
From time to time, games with new and unique themes and game mechanics show real promise on Facebook. This week, however, the fastest emerging games (defined by games under 1 million monthly active users) are mostly iconic existing games or clones of familiar favorites.
Draw My Thing (a Pictionary clone by OMGPOP) and Dog Show Friends (a Purina branded pet game by 4mm Games) both doubled their MAU this week with impressive gains. Cooking Mama, the Facebook version of the successful Nintendo DS game covered extensively here, is still going strong with another 169,000 MAU added this week.
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Top Gainers This Week – Games
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Miner Speed is a new Bejeweled Match 3 clone that doesn’t really bring anything new to the social gaming space. Originally debuted on King.com’s gaming portal, the game has familiar features such as leaderboards, multipliers, boost upsells, and neighbors. Miner Speed gained over 130,000 new players this week for a total of 382,000 MAU. King.com also developed Puzzle Saga, another match 3 game on the emerging list this week down at the number 12 position.
Football Life by 109studio debuted in late November of last year and has been slowly gaining a modest amount of traffic. In Football Life, you create a football (soccer) team and train rigorously for matches by spending energy through clicking on buttons to increase your attributes. Matches consist of a game played out in front of you which can be skipped, slowed down, or sped up, though it doesn’t appear a player can affect the outcome. The gameplay does not feel particularly unique or compelling, but Football Life gained 36% more players this week bringing the total MAU to 217,469.
Finally, a slew of RPGs and strategy games have made their way onto this week’s emerging list. Legacy of a Thousand Suns is an older title by 5th Planet with a rich narrative that we reviewed last year. Though we noted that it feels evolutionary in depth for a Facebook game, it topped out at 500,000 MAU. It’s now creeping back up the charts after what appears to be a marketing push earlier this month and is currently sitting at 378,000 MAU.
Digital Chocolate’s NanoStar Siege is now poised for a comeback after reaching a height of 1.2 million MAU in its primetime. It has dwindled down to a mere 274,000 MAU, but Digital Chocolate seem to be applying some resources to the game to bring life back to the title. Kabam’s Glory of Rome also a major increase in traffic this week. We reviewed this strategy game back in December.
Tami Baribeau is Senior Community Manager at ZipZapPlay and a contributor to Inside Social Games.
February 6th, 2011 at 3:09 am
That list would be more interesting with the ratio DAU/MAU and a litlle marketing analysis.
February 22nd, 2011 at 7:42 pm
[...] by 109studio, this soccer title takes a role-playing approach to the sport. First appearing on our emerging apps list earlier this month, the game now hosts north of 209,000 monthly active users but a rather low daily [...]