Planet Domo Appears in Our Orbit on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
Domo, a highly recognizable mascot from Japanese TV, makes his way to Facebook this week with the launch of Planet Domo from San Francisco-based developer TheBroth. Meanwhile Hero City and Army Attack vie for the top spot on this week’s list of emerging Facebook games.
It might be time to say goodbye to Army Attack this week as its growth trajectory puts it above the 1 million monthly active user mark, which would class it out of the emerging Facebook games category. We could perhaps expect to see it replaced by Zynga’s newly released Empires & Allies, assuming the game doesn’t hit 1 million MAU in its first seven days. You can read our early looks at both games here and here.
Top Gainers This Week – Games
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Planet Domo appears to be a treasure hunting adventure game where players click on locations to find pieces of postcards that “unravel the mystery” of a mythical cheesecake. The game features a highly animated art style and numerous types of standard currency to spend in-game. Facebook Credits make up the game’s premium in-game currency.
Farther down the list, we see Dragon Age Legends gaining some ground, perhaps as the result of new quests recently added to the game. We also see several new games gaining growth in their early days, so sit tight for early looks on Battle Cards, TinierCafe, and Hotshot next week.
All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Come back next week for our top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, our daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.
June 4th, 2011 at 6:40 am
For the love of god, stop using MAU for ranking. MAU means NOTHING.
http://futuregamedev.com/2011/06/01/why-mau-is-not-important/
June 4th, 2011 at 8:44 am
I left a response on your blog post. Here it is:
As the editor of Inside Network, I can tell you that we don’t entirely disagree.
We’ve written frequently over the years about the shortcomings of MAU as a metric, basically making similar points to what you say above. We also publish posts at least once each week on both Inside Social Games and Inside Facebook looking at DAU gains among apps. And, typically, when we review a particular game or category, our focus is on DAU more than MAU.
So why do we still cover MAU at all? Because it is unique data. We do not have direct access to the “real MAU” numbers, as you note, and we do not have a steady flow of other metrics to cover.
Facebook MAU numbers, for all their issues, can still provide valuable indications, like how aggressively a developer is spending on ads around a launch. People in the industry also know that.
June 4th, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Thanks for the answer, Eric.
I fully agree careful analysis can give some information about how aggressively a developer employs marketing tactics. It also becomes harder to tell the different sources of marketing when it’s a high volume game (where XPromo can also be a substantial number).
However, even with the extremely skewed numbers you get from facebook, you can still analyze performance of applications better than have charts based on MAU alone.
The easy example is to look for fluctuation of Stickiness relative to DAU. Sudden drop in Stickiness on day X and than returning to higher figure on the next days may mark a beginning of a significant marketing campaign.
The opposite can be used to identify end of such a campaign (when stickiness suddenly jump higher and remains relatively around that point).
Regardless of the question whether or not these issues should be considered in the ranking, comparing DAU graph and the Stickiness graph can give you a much better measurement of how successful a game is, than just MAU.
Our industry is still young and standards are still forming. Don’t be shy experimenting with better ranking algorithms. I’m sure it will benefit the industry as a whole.
June 9th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
[...] Planet Domo is a mission-based adventure game starring Japanese pop culture icon, Domo. The game was developed for Facebook by TheBroth, which also develops Barn Buddy and its Turkish language version, Komşu Çiftlik. Shortly after its late May 2011 debut, Planet Domo hit our top 20 emerging Facebook games list. [...]
June 10th, 2011 at 8:01 am
[...] one week after first appearing on our list of emerging Facebook games as tracked by AppData, TheBroth’s Planet Domo lands in [...]