Galaxy Online II Leads This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
This week’s list of the top emerging Facebook games (as identified by those games still under 1 million monthly active users) contains some familiar titles as well as a slew of new games that we haven’t seen before. According to AppData — our analytics service for measuring the traffic in the top Facebook games — Galaxy Online II has had the strongest growth over the past week. The sci-fi strategy game by IGG grew by 500% this week, and now has over a half million MAU.
Another familiar title is Pirates Saga, the treasure seeking game with traditional MMORPG elements that we reviewed back in December. While Pirates Saga has seen some fluctuation in its daily active users, its MAU has been climbing steadily since the end of February. Another game that is growing fast is DDTank. We took a closer look at this Worms-inspired game earlier in the week and felt that it was overwhelmingly full of features that made it seem bloated and shallow.
Top Gainers This Week – Games
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Twilight Wars is an action game launched at the end of February that pits players up against randomly matched teammates in an “every man for himself” battle. Players are matched according to skill level and can pick up weapons on the ground within the stage. Twilight Wars — developed by Gamelet — has a very retro gaming feel with pixel art characters and environment and a top-down view. Players shoot or slash each other with weapons and are scored based on the amount of kills and deaths they have within the match. Rankings and leaderboards allow players to compare their score with their friends, or with everyone who plays the game. Everything about Twilight Wars feels very simplistic and is lacking polish, however there is a element game below that could be viable with core gamers if synchronous gameplay ends up gaining legitimacy on Facebook. Twilight Wars currently has almost 250,000 monthly players.
Spot the Difference is exactly what it sounds like, a game in which the objective is to find all of the differences between two pictures. This Lunatic Games title is a simple single player title that is lacking in social features aside from a rudimentary leaderboard. Players have a set amount of time to find all of the differences before their time runs out, and incorrect clicks result in the time depleting faster. Free clues are given out sparingly as they are driving the game’s monetization (in addition to banner advertising). This genre of game is popular in the casual games market, but at this point it doesn’t feel as if Spot the Difference has brought an innovative and social experience to Facebook. The game launched in October of 2008 and only had a recent resurgence over the past week. At its peak, Spot the Difference reached 683,000 MAU.
The data in this post comes via AppData, our data service tracking growth and trends across the Facebook platform.
March 12th, 2011 at 6:47 am
I’ll gear this review to 2 types of people: current Zune owners who are considering an upgrade, and people trying to decide between a Zune and an iPod. (There are other players worth considering out there, like the Sony Walkman X, but I hope this gives you enough info to make an informed decision of the Zune vs players other than the iPod line as well.)
March 16th, 2012 at 9:28 am
[...] isn’t the first time Galaxy Online II has appeared on our Emerging Games list. In May 2011, the game’s English version (which is now called Galaxy 2.0) appeared on the list. Galaxy 2.0 [...]