This week’s top 20 Facebook games by daily active users is a good mix of brand new titles and some older games on the rise. Leading the pack is Wooga’s Diamond Dash, which also led the charts this week in terms of monthly active user growth. According to AppData, our service for analyzing the growth of the top Facebook games, the game grew its DAU by 84% this week and does not appear to be slowing its pace any time soon.

Other older familiar titles on this week’s list include Monster Galaxy (Gaia’s Pokemon-inspired pet battling game), Ninja Saga, Jersey Shore, and Car Town. These games all made rather small increases percentage-wise, but were substantial enough to beat out many of the newer titles. Crowdstar’s It Girl was a top game of 2010 that has been declining as of late, but still has been holding on to its status as a top 20 game for both DAU and MAU.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Diamond Dash	484,933	+221,221	+84%
2.	Video Galerisi	150,227	+149,354	+17,108%
3.	Monster Galaxy	820,249	+92,712	+13%
4.	Daily Horoscope	1,580,182	+77,476	+5%
5.	開心水族箱	1,204,541	+72,977	+6%
6.	TrainCity	95,233	+64,782	+213%
7.	แฮปปี้เบบี้	62,095	+54,037	+671%
8.	Ninja Saga	1,029,668	+50,258	+5%
9.	Flutter	49,221	+46,798	+1,931%
10.	Angry Animals	45,632	+45,628	+1,140,700%
11.	Okey Kenti	60,678	+45,214	+292%
12.	Zombie Lane	251,282	+43,530	+21%
13.	Komşu Çiftlik	763,649	+31,945	+4%
14.	Jersey Shore	160,914	+27,606	+21%
15.	It Girl	1,134,156	+27,553	+2%
16.	Car Town	1,062,394	+25,671	+2%
17.	Boss Vegas	26,282	+25,326	+2,649%
18.	Social Empires	119,718	+21,879	+22%
19.	Okey	770,025	+17,837	+2%
20.	Happy Hospital	272,296	+17,276	+7%

Flutter, developed by Runaway Games, is not a new game. We covered the title when it launched last August, and thought it was an interesting foray into virtual space decoration and education. In Flutter, the player navigates a lush rainforest as a butterfly, learning about the ecosystem and the natural life that calls the rainforest home. Players have their own home ‘grove’ to decorate any way they like, and there is a small world to explore that gives XP and resources needed to access more of the game. It’s a rather simplistic game with an artistic aesthetic that is pleasing and relaxing to play. When first launched, Flutter failed to make any sort of impression whatsoever. The game has just now getting lift-off after being available for play for 8 months, and has gained over 45,000 DAU in the past week.

Train City by LIFO Interactive launched in December of last year. When we reviewed it, we thought it was a well-polished addition to the growing collection of train games on Facebook. Train City contains all of the pieces of the puzzle to making a decent Facebook game: a whimsical art style, easy to learn gameplay, and a compelling game loop that is familiar. Many game elements were borrowed from other games such as contracts (conductors in Train City), tax collection, and population growth. All in all, Train City feels like a very solid game that is on the rise after hovering around 200,000 MAU for several months.

The data in this post comes via AppData, our data service tracking growth and trends across the Facebook platform.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Ubisoft, Row Sham Bow Inc, Daglow Entertainment, Acquinity Interactive, Buffalo Studios, and Spooky Cool Labs.

• Director of Analytics (San Francisco, CA)
• Director, Game Analytics Operations (San Francisco, CA)
• Sr. Game Designer – Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
• Games Metrics Analyst (San Francisco, CA)

Row Sham Bow, Inc.

• Technical Director (Orlando, FL)
• Lead Game Designer (Orlando, FL)

Daglow Entertainment

• Product Director or Product Manager (Sausalito, CA)

• Senior Email Marketing Manager (Deerfield Beach, FL)

• Flash UI Game Designer (Santa Monica, CA)

• Art Director (Chicago, IL)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

EA’s social game developer Playfish gets a lot of traffic love for its FIFA and Madden branded Superstars sports titles developed jointly with EA Sports. Both games rank in the top 10 across all Electronic Arts titles, accounting for roughly 14% of EA’s total monthly and daily active user traffic according to our app tracking service, AppData. Madden is the smaller game with only 1.4 million MAU and just over 170,000 DAU to date, while FIFA is still going strong at 3.5 million MAU and roughly 560,000 DAU.

The newest title in the lineup, World Series Superstars, launched just last week to coincide with the start of the Major League Baseball season and Playfish VP of publishing and product management, C.J. Prober joins us for an interview on the title’s vital link to the real world MLB and how that grow the game’s audience hopefully past Madden’s.

Inside Social Games: First things first. Who’s your favorite pitcher?

C.J. Prober: Brian Wilson, relief pitcher for the SF Giants. [Pictured]

ISG: World Series Superstars differs from other games in the Superstars series in several ways — most notably by adding a highly interactive component to gameplay where players can control the action pitch-by-pitch. How did these features evolve out of previous Superstars games, EA Sports FIFA Superstars and Madden NFL Superstars?

Prober: In FIFA, there’s an animation [for individual soccer games]. In Madden, we wanted to take that to a new level, so we added Game Changers [items] you can play to impact the outcome of the game. So you can return a kickoff for a touchdown or score a field goal or what have you. The feedback from the players was really positive on that, so we’ve taken World Series to a whole new level. We’ve really increased the engagement around playing games in terms of managing [plays]. You also train your team in a much deeper way in MLB than in both FIFA and Madden. It’s kind of a much deeper exercise where you’re like, “Oh, do I want to juice my pitchers or train my outfield?”

ISG: How much of an impact does player interaction have on the outcome of ballgames? For example, if a player chose to manage a game directly instead of using the simulation mode where World Series plays the ballgame for them, could they pull off a win when the simulation would’ve determined that they lost?

Prober: You’re definitely at an advantage if you play the game strategically and manage your players, your training resources, and make smart decisions as you play the game. You can affect the outcome. Will it automatically result in a victory? Not necessarily, but you definitely have an advantage.

ISG: What other lessons did you take from FIFA and Madden to develop World Series?

Prober: I think the deeper training of players was a big on one. The nice thing about these games is that you can evolve them on a weekly basis. So we’ve taken some of the proven social mechanics and adopted those in World Series. For example, when you build out your stadium, it’s kind of an evolution of our collaborative social mechanics. Like if you want to build a dugout, you acquire the dugout and then you’ve got to hire your friends or you can accelerate that process using [the game’s premium currency] Baseball Cash. World Series has some more social hooks in it than we had in FIFA. But again, those games are continuing to evolve, so don’t be surprised to see these things in Madden or FIFA as well.

ISG: World Series launched specifically to coincide with the start of the Major League Baseball season and we know both Madden and FIFA contained some game functionality that depended on real world events within the sport. In what way will the MLB season affect World Series gameplay?

Prober: That’s actually one of the things that we’re excited about with respect to MLB relative to Madden and FIFA. MLB is a much more consistent series. In Madden you’ve got weekly games on Sunday and sometimes there’s games on Thursday. In MLB, you’ve got games happening every day. So we’re confident in the fact that people engage in their affinity for the sport on a daily basis. We think that’s going to increase the engagement of our players in World Series.

One of the things that we haven’t included as part of the launch — but it’s coming in the next couple of weeks — is the Predictor mode. In Madden we had this very light functionality where you would pick who would win the weekly games and you would compete against your friends around winning percentage, how good you were at predicting the winners. We had a mechanic where you had a certain amount of points you could [assign] to certain games you felt really confident about. In MLB, when Predictor mode launches, there’s going to be a game of the day. You’re going to make a selection of games and you’re going to be competing with your friends on a streak of how many games of the day you picked correctly.

ISG: Are you at all concerned that the audience for World Series will be smaller than FIFA’s because baseball is a very American sport? We observe that Madden NFL Superstars’ audience is less than half the size of FIFA’s, according to AppData.

Prober: I would say MLB is probably in between [FIFA and Madden in terms of audience size]. I think you have a lot of baseball fans outside the U.S. But I should point out that currently MLB is only available to players within North America. Nothing to announce on [other territories] at the moment. But one of the things that we’re really excited about with the launch of World Series Superstars is our relationship to MLB. We have a great marketing relationship, so they’re really going to support us through MLB.com and leveraging the channels to their fans to promote this game.

ISG: Any chance of the MLB offering free tickets to Superstars players?

Prober: We actually did a sweepstakes with Madden — at one point, it was going to be Super Bowl tickets and then we ended up changing that, but there were some pretty exciting prizes there. So the great thing about these games is that you have fans with a massive affinity for the sport, for the teams and for the players. And then it’s fun. And you’re competing against your friends. It’s a recipe for success. There’s just so many opportunities to have fun with this and push the boundaries of what’s been done before in sports games and social games that we’re kind of in a perpetual exercise of prioritization given the opportunity here.

ISG: Because your game is time-sensitive with respect to the MLB season, how important is it for the game to be fully developed right at launch to coincide with the series as opposed to other social games that iterate planned features over a period of time post-launch?

Prober: It’s definitely important. This is where I think EA Sports brings a great pedigree [through] the packaged goods business where we release sports titles on an annual basis. The team is very used to the deadline-driven release timeline in order to meet the launches that typically happen before the season. We definitely felt pressure to get World Series launched before the MLB season started. I think another underlying part of that question is has the bar risen in terms of what users expect from a polished, quality product. I think the answer is definitely yes. Over the last couple of years, we’ve really increased the quality and the polish and the depth of our games at the time of launch and users expect that.

World Series Superstars is the latest branded sports game from EA’s Playfish, following on the heels of Madden NFL Superstars and EA Sports FIFA Superstars. The game launched just last week to coincide with the start of the Major League Baseball season.

Like other Superstars titles, World Series puts players in a managerial role of the sport where they buy players for the team, upgrade their home stadiums, and organize game schedules. The number of individual ballgames a player can play at a time is restricted by Tickets, which players earn over a certain amount of time, buy with premium in-game currency, or by win in ballgames. Primary social interactions come from leaderboards, achievements, “Brag” posts on Walls, and a gameplay mode called Exhibition where players can challenge friends’ teams without spending Tickets. World Series monetizes through selling premium currency via Facbeook Credits, credit card, or offer wall transactions.

World Series adds some significant features to the formula made popular by its predecessors. Foremost is the interactive game simulation, which builds on Madden NFL’s semi-interactive experience that let players slightly affect a game’s outcome with Game Changer bonus items (e.g. a Field Goal item that the player can click post-touchdown). World Series goes even more interactive, allowing players to command the team on a pitch-by-pitch basis throughout the game simulation. While playing defense, players can order the pitcher to pitch to batter, pitch around or walk a batter; while playing offense, players can command batters to swing away, bunt, sacrifice bunt, or runners to steal bases. Players can also use a series of Game Changer items for an instantaneous action like Home Run. Players may opt out of the interactive experience by skipping single innings, skipping the entire game, or switching on the simulation mode so that World Series plays the game itself while the player watches.

Thanks in part to this deeper interactive user experience, the training phase in World Series is also more robust compared to Madden or FIFA. Instead of assigning out a flat score to all players on the team, the user can assign different amounts of points to specific positions. For example, a player might want to funnel points to a specific pitcher for a higher chance of strikeouts.

The last “new” component World Series brings to the Superstars lineup is the depth of social hooks. Some of these are tweaks to existing social hooks in other games; for example, players can win Tickets by beating their friends in Exhibition mode. Others are extensions of existing hooks, like the stadium building system that now lets you recruit friends for construction work instead of just asking them for gifts to complete the construction. If friends are unavailable, players can fill construction positions by purchasing workers with premium currency.

In the coming weeks, Playfish intends to roll out a Predictor mode similar to Madden NFL’s weekly feature that lets players predict the outcome of actual games in the season. Because MLB is played on a daily basis as opposed to weekly, we expect to see some tweaks to the mode that may give rise to more of a gambling feature where players can win prizes.

World Series so far has 43,000 daily active users and 100,000 monthly active users after its first week. You can follow its progress on AppData, our traffic tracking service for social games and developers.

Although it announced a $30 million third round of funding in January, Kabam is talking to investors about adding significantly more money to its bank account. It is looking to raise between $50 million and $75 million, according to two sources we’ve spoken with, following a quiet but lucrative 2010 for the company.

After initially building a network of applications for fans of sports and television shows, Kabam transitioned in 2009 to focus on social games for serious gamers. Its initial foray into this type of application, Kingdoms of Camelot, has according to industry sources generated significant revenue for the company despite having relatively low usage numbers. At its peak, the game had 933,000 daily active users and 6.57 million monthly active users; it has been declining in recent months, due to Kabam’s focus on newer games like Glory of Rome and Dragons of Atlantis. Still, the game has largely powered Kabam’s recent revenue growth, which many in the industry believe is in the tens of millions of dollars.

The company, for its part, isn’t commenting on this article.

Top 5 Applications By Kabam

		Name	MAU		DAU
1.		Dragons of Atlantis	3,084,367		308,635
2.		Glory of Rome	1,799,503		112,756
3.		Kingdoms of Camelot	1,420,958		359,781
4.		Global Warfare	152,714		11,658
5.		Hero Force	94,371		4,526

But why would the company want to raise even more money, after just announcing this last round?

First, the $30 million was actually raised in 2010, so a new round wouldn’t follow as closely on the prior one as it might appear.

Second, Kabam has been investing heavily in its other games. As you can see in the chart, via AppData, our tracking service for the top apps on Facebook, the developer is getting at least decent growth from some of them. Zynga may have led social gaming to the mass market but Kabam’s goal is to take social gaming back to hardcore players. A new round could help it cement its lead in this area, even as most larger developers continue to focus on tried-and-true varieties of social games, like simulations.

Third, the company still has some work to do in adapting to Facebook’s latest platform changes. It is still moving over to Credits, Facebook’s mandatory paid virtual currency. And, like many other developers, it is trying to optimize its marketing and advertising efforts after Facebook pared down communication channels last year but didn’t introduce significant new ones. Engaging and monetizing users on Facebook has become more costly than last year.

The new funding, if it happens, would follow a total of nearly $40 million raised over three rounds from Canaan Partners, Betfair, Redpoint Ventures and Intel Capital.

Zynga is announcing today that it has “acquired the team” from MarketZero, a long-time poker services provider. The Austin, Texas company, which is apparently not being acquired itself, runs a web site for online card players called PokerTableRatings. Self-described as a “collection of useful tools designed to help poker players maximize their online profits,” the site includes a variety of community and reporting tools so players can find friends, research the history of opponents, and more.

Our understand is that the MarketZero team is going to work on improving Zynga’s oldest top title, Texas HoldEm Poker. Like other online poker games, Texas HoldEm Poker sees a high volume of transactions and is vulnerable to fraud, hacking and real money trading scams. Just last month, a British man convicted of stealing 400 billion chips from the game, some of which he sold on eBay, was sentenced to two years in prison. MarketZero’s expertise could help Zynga cut down on similar fraud risks and improve user experience. We understand that Zynga is not interested in entering the real money online poker market.

Launched in the early days of the platform, Texas HoldEm found a ready player base among online card players, and quickly grew to become one of the company’s most valuable properties. Zynga used the experience building the title — and the revenue generated from it — to power into role-playing games and eventually simulations. Today, all these years alter, it still has 6.95 million daily active users and 36.9 million monthly active users according to our app tracking service, AppData. That’s substantially more than any other card game. Maybe the hires will be tasked with beefing up the title’s offerings for its large and die-hard user base?

Yet, this so-called acquisition could just be a pure talent grab. The team also provides custom software development and consulting services to other companies, and perhaps Zynga will distribute the new hires — founders Gustavo Abdala, Amir Elaguizy, Nir Leibovich, Timothy Sullivan and Jason Wang — to other parts of the company.

Zynga also highlights that this is its eleventh acquisition of late. The previous ten:

• XPD in Beijing
• Challenge Games in Austin
• Unoh Games in Tokyo
• Conduit Labs in Boston
• Dextrose AG in Frankfurt
• Bonfire Studios in Dallas
• Newtoy Inc. in McKinney, Texas
• Flock team
• Area/Code, New York
• Floodgate Entertainment

Young, 2009-founded social developer Nimbus Games released Apollo 69 on Facebook in early March. It’s an arcade-style game that has players launching hamsters into low orbit to achieve a distance-determined “high-score.”

Other than visual style, Apollo 69 isn’t terribly different than older titles Paf le Chien or Kickmania! where players use cannons, explosives, and other power-ups to launch a projectile as far as possible. In Apollo 69, players launch a hamster out of a swiveling cannon, timing a spacebar press or mouse click first to stop it at the ideal angle and then a second to time to determine launch strength via a fluctuating power meter. Once airborne, the hamster’s flight is affected by whatever he hits or by power-ups a player can activate to gain extra distance, like a grenade. Striking birds in the air or jello on the ground will slow him down, while landing on explosive packages, balloons, or other cannons will send him farther. During flight, the hamster collects coins whenever he happens to touch them. Players can use coins to purchase more powerful launch cannons. Each launch costs the player energy, meaning a player can only fire so many hamsters in one sitting. Players can increase energy by inviting friends to the game, but for the most part, social interaction comes from leaderboards and wall posts.

If there were one difference between Apollo 69 and its predecessors, it would be that players can complete achievements to earn “Stars,” which can be used to upgrade special items. As mentioned above, some items give the player an extra distance boost when used after launching the hamster. For example, using a grenade will re-launch the hamster once it hits the ground, while a spring boost item passively improves all launching items he happens to hit. Each item or power-up, if not consumable, uses up large portions of energy when activated.

Apollo 69 monetizes by selling consumable items for virtual currency simply named “Money.” The currency can be bought in quantities of 200, 600, and 1300 with Facebook Credits equivalent to $2, $5, and $10 amounts respectively. The virtual currency can also be earned by completing offers through SuperRewards.

Because the game is still very young, developer Nimbus Games tells ISG that it is open to user feedback to improve the game. According to the developer, there are still about 50% more features to add including viral hooks, new levels with new items, a leveling system for the hamster with character customization, and an equipment system where players can construct things from from items collected in flight.

In the meantime, Nimbus Games tells us that they will be expanding their collection of quiz games like News Geek to include health, kids, and music, eventually combining all of them into a larger meta-game. The developer also just released a hidden object game called Seek & Find Emporium to Facebook. Readers can track it and Apollo 69’s traffic trends on AppData, our tracking service for social games and developers.

With the Facebook games market heavily dominated by Zynga, EA’s Playfish, and CrowdStar among others, the platform no longer looks like a welcoming place to would-be indie game developers. Synapse Games, however, traveled the indie route starting in 2008 when two longtime friends in Chicago started a game company together. Through two asynchronous massively multiplayer online card games, War Metal and Tyrant, Synapse Games found success by appealing to niche markets. Despite small traffic numbers, the company says it is profitable. Profitable enough, at least, to hire new staff and launch a new game without outside investors.

Inside Social Games: Synapse Games launched War Metal in 2009. The game’s total monthly active users and daily active users peaked awhile back without getting very big, but we can see it has one of the higher DAU/MAU ratios for games, at around 30%. How do you judge War Metal’s success?

Alex Reeve, Synapse Games President and Lead Designer: We base it on a combination of community feedback [channels]. When the game launched, players got really excited about it. They formed groups and were extremely engaged on both the forums and within the game itself. The total number of users was higher than we had had before.

Nick Germain, Synapse Games Vice President: War Metal was really our first game to gain traction and get to critical mass. We didn’t release the game until July 2009. By then, we did have a few other games [...] that ran between October 2008 and July 2009, [but they] aren’t really part of our portfolio anymore.

ISG: War Metal is an entirely original intellectual property that you used to build your next game, Tyrant. How did you go about developing the concept for Facebook?

AR: Originally we were just thinking about what would be cool. We come from a traditional gamer background and we really didn’t see anything on Facebook that had a kind of grungy, futuristic feel. I think it fills a gap that’s on Facebook right now. There’s a handful of other [asynchronous MMO] games out there, but they all have pretty different themes than War Metal.

ISG: With core gamers not always immediately embracing Facebook as a gaming platform, do you find yourself sometimes catering to two audiences — one on Facebook and one on the web? We observe that Tyrant (pictured above) is featured on retailer GameStop’s game portal site, Kongregate.

AR: Yeah, what we’re seeing is a trend for those markets to merge. I think it’s still early in that [process], but the overlap between the two is growing.

NG: I think the market’s telling us a little something. Having put Tyrant on Kongregate, the way the [audience] is reacting to it there seems to come from a more traditional gamer background. We realize that there is crossover with the Facebook [audience], but Kongregate seems to us to be where the two are bridged.

ISG: Do you think games have a harder time finding an audience on Facebook because of the restrictions on viral channels?

AR: I think that’s probably been one of the biggest difficulties that we’ve had to overcome. The hardest hit was around mid 2009 when the majority of the channels started closing. We’ve kind of worked around that and the biggest opportunity we have for that is Kongregate. [The audience] is actually monetizing better than what we’ve seen on Facebook. So that’s going to be a key part of our future strategy.

ISG: Why do you think Tyrant is monetizing better on Kongregate than Facebook?

AR: I think it’s a better fit in terms of the market. They’re real gamers.

ISG: What is your growth strategy going forward? Will you expand on Tyrant for both Facebook and Kongregate?

AR: Yes, we are working on an expansion for Tyrant. When we make a game, we want it to have an extremely long lifespan. We expect Tyrant to last at least a couple of years. We’re hoping five years. We want to release expansions for it every two months. We’re also working on a new game [set outside] the War Metal universe. We’re branching out a little bit. At this point, I think most of our growth is going to be through Facebook marketing, more traditional ad spend.

ISG: Do you think Facebook is still a viable platform for indie game developers?

AR: It definitely is harder than it used to be to get in. I think looking at other platforms off of Facebook is probably going to be the easiest way to get a foot in. I think the important strategy for a small developer at this point is that you really have to go niche.

You can track Synapse Games’ War Metal and Tyrant on AppData, our traffic tracking service for Facebook games.

Zynga announced this morning that DreamWorks Animation chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg joined the board of directors at the social games giant. Board members don’t always play major roles in the companies they join, but Katzenberg’s name alone helps Zynga burnish its credibility among more traditional media players — and he could personally provide the developer with special access to Hollywood’s production and distribution prowess.

“Jeffrey redefined storytelling when he launched DreamWorks Animation,” Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said in a press release. “He turned an independent studio into a brand name and his vision will be an asset as we work to define the future of play.”

Katzenberg is best known in the film industry for his work on animated films. In 1994, he co-founded DreamWorks SKG with with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen after resigning from his position as Chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Between the two studios, Katzenberg managed and produced the releases of blockbuster animated films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Shrek (2001), Madagascar (2005), Kung Fu Panda (2008), and How to Train Your Dragon (2010).

Zynga seems to be expanding its brand promotion tie-in strategy of late. In the last year, we’ve seen branded campaigns in Zynga games from McDonald’s, 7-Eleven, and Green Giant, and we’ve seen film cross-promotion across specific Zynga games. For example, Paramount Pictures’ Rango got a branded quest in FrontierVille; Mafia Wars featured special themed goods to promote the DVD release of Universal Studios’ Public Enemies, and DreamWorks’ got a single-day campaign tied to the theatrical release of Megamind. With Katzenberg on the board, we expect to see Zynga’s relationship with the film industry deepen, and we’re wondering if a cross-promotion could be in the works for DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda 2, which is due to hit theaters next month.

Katzenberg joins existing board members Pincus, Zynga EVP of Business Owen Van Natta, Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Foundry Group Managing Director Brad Feld, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

The top game on this week’s leaderboard of fastest growing Facebook games by monthly active users is Wooga’s Diamond Dash. This brightly colored puzzle game requires players to pop like-colored bubbles to clear them from the game board, all the while competing with friends for top weekly scores. Players have a finite number of lives (or plays) that can be used, and can earn new lives by waiting for them to replenish automatically or asking for them from friends.

According to AppData, our metrics service for monitoring the top games on Facebook, Diamond Dash has not only been on a steady incline, it also boasts a strong retention number of over 27%. This number is slightly higher than CityVille and other top games. We will be watching Diamond Dash closely as it fights to hold its number one position on the weekly charts.

Other familiar games on this week’s list include FarmVille, Monster Galaxy, Bejeweled Blitz, and Monopoly Millionaires. Many of these games appear to be trading off positions on the leaderboard with each week that passes.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

Name MAU Gain Gain,% 1. Diamond Dash 1,738,270 +856,819 +97% 2. Monster Galaxy 8,863,763 +852,891 +11% 3. Daily Horoscope 4,504,051 +621,982 +16% 4. Zoo World 7,031,867 +589,113 +9% 5. Monopoly Millionaires 5,874,546 +576,048 +11% 6. Zombie Lane 1,006,801 +459,152 +84% 7. FarmVille 47,505,328 +443,624 +0.94% 8. Mafia Wars Game 17,433,067 +347,951 +2% 9. Spot The Difference 1,552,837 +299,520 +24% 10. Video Galerisi 325,440 +266,488 +452% 11. Bejeweled Blitz 11,599,591 +259,161 +2% 12. Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game 1,306,143 +256,146 +24% 13. NBA Legend: Official NBA Game 1,056,067 +235,130 +29% 14. EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars: Real football & soccer! 3,582,708 +234,702 +7% 15. Games 8,112,606 +233,970 +3% 16. Slotomania – Slot Machines 1,465,455 +219,592 +18% 17. Okey Plus 994,508 +218,549 +28% 18. Dragon Age Legends 713,284 +204,651 +40% 19. Ninja Saga 5,009,567 +203,729 +4% 20. CSI: Crime City 1,880,106 +202,310 +12%

Zoo World is RockYou’s signature social game, the title that made the company shift from lightweight applications and move onto larger scale social game products. At its height last year, Zoo World reached a peak of over 20 million MAU and almost 3 million daily active users. At that time, it was a leading Facebook game sitting alongside titles by Playdom, Zynga, Playfish, and Crowdstar. Today, Zoo World is climbing back up the charts. While 7 million MAU is nothing to sneeze at, Zoo World is still a long way from its glory days. The game originally grew because of an extensive animal collection and breeding mechanic that made its players want to collect-them-all (a version of it also appeared in top non-game RockYou apps, which also helped). Today, other games such as Monster Galaxy are using pet collection as motivation to play, and Zoo World feels like an older title with fewer bells and whistles. Nonetheless, for a game that launched in 2009, Zoo World has done an impressive job of holding on to its core players.

Monster Galaxy is Gaia Online’s first venture into social games on Facebook. It has everything that a good Pokemon-inspired game should have, including pet collections, combat, leveling up, and of course, finding that elusive secret pet that requires unlocking many before it. Monster Galaxy has many social features, allowing players to help each other find and collect pets (called Mogas) and provide seeds which allow them to be captured. It’s a highly polished game with a unique art style that sets it apart from many other games.

The data in this post comes via AppData, our data service tracking growth and trends across the Facebook platform.