Inside Social Games

Last week it was number two; the week before that it was nothing, because it had just been released. Social City, the new city building game from Playdom, has flown to the top of our weekly AppData list of top Facebook gainers by daily active users, adding more new players than games several times its size.

There’s obviously some heavy advertising from Playdom behind the scenes. But as we found when it was brand-new, Social City is actually a great game. Nevermind that players have experienced technical problems since the game’s launch; they keep coming back anyway.

Proof is in the numbers. We’ve been watching Social City’s DAU as a percentage of monthly active users — the number of people among all the players who return daily — for several days. Following the launch-time spike of new DAU, Social City’s percentage settled to its current 44 percent. Defying our expectations, it hasn’t dipped any further. It’s an extremely high number that seems to show Social City’s new players genuinely love the game.

Nevertheless, Playdom still has to fight it out with other publishers to rule the emerging city building genre. At lower positions below, you can see two similar games, Towner and My City Life:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Social City	2,475,502	+1,732,288	+69.98
2.	Birthday Cards	2,636,459	+1,333,714	+50.59
3.	FarmVille	30,973,370	+1,060,995	+3.43
4.	Café World	8,896,906	+366,051	+4.11
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,637,643	+332,075	+5.00
6.	Mafia Wars	6,552,404	+201,596	+3.08
7.	Tiki Resort	590,285	+192,160	+32.55
8.	Pet Society	4,456,973	+152,818	+3.43
9.	Bubble Island	580,362	+150,714	+25.97
10.	MindJolt Games	3,329,168	+144,263	+4.33
11.	Bejeweled Blitz	2,798,882	+87,439	+3.12
12.	Towner	189,978	+77,490	+40.79
13.	Mahjongg Dimensions	228,713	+63,324	+27.69
14.	2010 Bracket Challenge	54,335	+49,459	+91.03
15.	PoxNora	46,975	+46,507	+99.00
16.	Country Life	2,577,705	+46,329	+1.80
17.	My City Life	532,022	+38,604	+7.26
18.	Games	279,840	+38,579	+13.79
19.	Bola	87,397	+37,532	+42.94
20.	SPP Ranch!	200,026	+34,773	+17.38

Following Birthday Cards, which is only loosely a game, there’s a foursome of Zynga games: FarmVille, Café World, Texas HoldEm Poker and Mafia Wars. All said, Zynga has managed to add about a million DAU since last month, edging over 67 million this week.

Tiki Resort returns us to Playdom. This island resort building game was released a couple weeks before Social City, but it only has about half the players and far fewer DAU. Still, if you’re not measuring it against its sibling’s stand out growth, Tiki Resort is doing pretty well.

One special circumstance to note this week: every one of the top 10 games on the list is from a large or well-funded company. That’s not the case every week, but it may happen more often as the big boys acquire ever more leverage to promote their products.

Playdom’s new city building game, Social City, is on fire. It tops out this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook games by monthly active users with 4.5 million new users, more than four times as many as the next-closest game.

The company has spared no expensive in promoting Social City — we’ve been spotting its ads repeatedly on Facebook. Despite being dogged by errors since its release earlier this month, the game is also attracting an incredibly loyal fan base. Our stats currently show that some 44 percent of its monthly users also return daily, although that’s admittedly an early measurement that will almost certainly drop a bit over time.

Although not terribly different in mechanics from other time-management games, it’s starting to look like SimCity-style games could be the next boom in Facebook gaming. We first pointed out the trend before Social City’s launch, when a handful of independent companies launched their own games. My Town, My City Life and Towner are still doing pretty well — you can see two below, while My City Life came in at number 21 — although it remains to be seen how they’ll hold up under the assault of a big company like Playdom.

Here’s the rest of the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Social City	4,903,377	+4,583,083	+93.47
2.	Tiki Resort	2,412,391	+1,063,186	+44.07
3.	Bubble Island	2,245,579	+1,038,735	+46.26
4.	MindJolt Games	20,921,341	+995,553	+4.76
5.	Jeux Gratuits	1,000,142	+757,906	+75.78
6.	Texas HoldEm Poker	28,026,262	+746,189	+2.66
7.	Zoo Paradise	656,381	+544,053	+82.89
8.	Towner	981,779	+534,449	+54.44
9.	Restaurant City	15,407,398	+467,571	+3.03
10.	Mahjongg Dimensions	1,005,516	+394,272	+39.21
11.	Ameba Pico	346,812	+322,334	+92.94
12.	Ninja Saga	4,293,040	+307,537	+7.16
13.	Music Pets	612,719	+297,674	+48.58
14.	SPP Ranch!	2,901,793	+296,043	+10.20
15.	Top Stalkers	560,276	+292,579	+52.22
16.	Jumping Dog	800,306	+263,994	+32.99
17.	Puzzle Bobble	561,610	+243,235	+43.31
18.	My Town	3,594,385	+242,052	+6.73
19.	Glamble	592,164	+231,397	+39.08
20.	MMA Pro Fighter	788,926	+231,223	+29.31

Tiki Resort is also a Playdom game. It and Bubble Island, by Wooga, were both leaders on last week’s list, too. Despite the apparent thematic similarity, they’re totally different: Tiki Resort has players build an island amusement park, while Bubble Island is a well-made bubble blasting game.

MindJolt Games, at number four, is continuing the growth trend it started when a group of former MySpace execs acquired the company. It’s followed by Jeux Gratuits, a French-language app that, like MindJolt, is a wrapper for a multiple casual games.

Zoo Paradise is the last game we’ll point out. The recent release from CrowdStar attempts to follow up on the smashing success of RockYou’s Zoo World. But so far it hasn’t had time to budge the needle for CrowdStar, which actually dipped below 50 million MAU this week.

Given the success of simulation games like Zynga’s FarmVille, it has seemed a matter of time until social game developers started making social versions of the hit computer game SimCity. And they have, over the last couple of months – and now we have what could be quickly becoming a hit. Playdom launched Social City around March 3rd, and a little over a week later it has grown to 3.23 million monthly active users (MAU) and 1.67 million daily active users (DAU).

Check out our review of the game if you want to get the details — basically, Social City is one of the better titles in the genre, that we’ve seen so far. And other titles are growing, too. Broken Bulb Studios’ My Town is up to 3.52 million MAU, albeit it’s had a couple months to grow. It and a smaller city-building game from an unknown developer, Towner, both made our most recent list of the games that have gained the most DAU in the past week. My City Life, by a developer apparently named City Life, has been cresting at slightly above 4 million MAU.

We assume these games aren’t just growing because people like telling their friends about how much fun they are. Playdom, for example, has been running what appears to be a big ad campaign on Facebook promoting the game; it likely hopes the title will become the FarmVille of the genre before other big social gaming developers build their own. It has also been promoting it across its other applications. So far, the results seem to be paying off.

MySpace is giving social gaming a big upgrade today, adding a new set of features, and partners, that intend to make third-party gaming apps a prominent part of the service.

The integration of games into MySpace’s core interface could specifically give game engagement a big boost. “Games” has replaced “Apps” as a tab in the site’s top navigation bar. Click on it and you’ll see a revamped page called “Games & Apps,” that contains a number of new features for games. Users’ home pages also now include a “Featured Games” window on the right-hand side that shows you games that MySpace staff has recommended. And, more updates from apps will now appear within users activity “Stream” of updates, including when friends score an app from 1 to 5 stars.

Meanwhile, the “Games & Apps” tab has gotten more features intended to help users find and engage with games. On the top right-hand module of the page, you can see your friends latest activities in apps. Another part of the page, “Featured,” shows games that are handpicked for quality by MySpace staff. “Suggestions” uses an algorithm to figure out which apps might appeal to each user the most, and includes a way to sort by only game apps. These suggestions are based on factors like which kinds of games users have already played, which ones their friends have been playing, and how well the apps are ranked by users.

Developers who have built apps for MySpace already will appreciate these changes, as the company previously gave games minimal attention. Some game actions showed up in users’ streams, and games appeared within a simpler apps page. That was it.

MySpace has still been the de facto place for social game developers to go besides Facebook. While many applications have gained millions of users — see our most recent list of top 25 MySpace games for more on that — a main way to gain an audience was through advertising within MySpace’s apps page. The company’s goal with the launch today is to have social games help increase the number of users and their engagement.

It already has around 100 million monthly active users worldwide, although this number has been falling in the past year. Of its users, 28 million use apps every month, and more than half of those play games; 56% female, and 44% male. With the updates today, co-President Mike Jones says the company is aiming to get half the site’s users gaming every month.

Social games launching on MySpace today include:

• Fish Isle (IGG)
• Hoop Fever Live (TheBroth)
• Kingdoms of Camelot (Watercooler)
• Paradise Paintball (CMUNE)
• SPP Ranch (Slide)
• Warlords (BitRhymes)
• Wild Ones (Playdom)
• Zombie Revenge (DeezGames)

The company is also announcing a couple other new, related projects today. One is an iPhone app called Neon, designed for games. You can log in with your MySpace account, see notifications and app invites from friends, and respond. While you can’t play games within the app, your responses will be recorded within MySpace. For example, MySpace’s Mobsters role-playing game might tell you that you’ve gained a free gun in the game, and you can click to approve this. When you accept friends’ invites to apps, MySpace will install the app on your profile on the site. This is not the only MySpace iPhone app planned, by the way — it also has more coming for the main site, as well as for other areas it focuses on, like music and entertainment.

It also has a few service partners it’s announcing: game development tool Unity, cross-platform social feature provider ScoreLoop and cloud gaming service Groovy Cortext.

MySpace’s gaming efforts have also included more fundamental changes to its developer platform, recently coming out with an analytics API, for example, that helps developers better track user metrics. The company has, as many readers know, been going through bigger changes. The News Corp.-owned company’s chief executive, Owen Van Natta, was let go last month; with Jones and another executive, Jason Hirschhorn, becoming co-presidents. All of these executives came on less than a year ago, replacing the company’s founding executive team. The company has spent much of the last year talking about how it’s going to become more of an entertainment service, but up to this point it has been focused on other areas, like music. Games are now front and center.

Overall gains in daily active users (DAU) have recovered after the dip we noted last week, led by FarmVille and Playdom’s new game, Social City. This is our weekly AppData list of leading Facebook games by growth in DAU.

FarmVille has shown steady growth in monthly active users for several weeks, but its DAU gains have been unsteady. The Zynga game still hasn’t reached an all-time high in DAU, but it has returned to the point it was at a couple weeks back, with over 30 million DAU.

Here are the rest of the list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	30,806,872	+2,103,410	+6.83
2.	Social City	1,239,331	+1,239,240	+99.99
3.	Restaurant City	3,670,846	+358,434	+9.76
4.	Pet Society	4,304,155	+310,402	+7.21
5.	Bubble Island	504,192	+259,995	+51.57
6.	YoVille	2,132,214	+191,937	+9.00
7.	Tiki Resort	427,563	+178,463	+41.74
8.	Jeux Gratuits	166,892	+165,108	+98.93
9.	Happy Aquarium	4,693,053	+155,957	+3.32
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,305,568	+128,394	+2.04
11.	Zoo Paradise	122,571	+117,895	+96.19
12.	Farm Town	2,455,361	+91,518	+3.73
13.	My Town	801,063	+91,023	+11.36
14.	Mahjongg Dimensions	195,090	+74,702	+38.29
15.	Sunshine Ranch	560,495	+60,194	+10.74
16.	Towner	127,192	+47,490	+37.34
17.	Fish World	1,095,925	+39,763	+3.63
18.	Wild Ones	321,013	+34,496	+10.75
19.	Live Games	40,721	+33,849	+83.12
20.	Country Story	1,110,220	+30,612	+2.76

Social City’s DAU gains are impressive, although the stat is likely inflated by brand-new players. But the new Playdom game, isn’t alone, either; two of its peers in the SimCity genre, My Town and Towner also made it into the top 20 this week. As a category, these games have been taking off since we wrote about them three weeks back; we also reviewed Social City last week.

Restaurant City and Pet Society, both from Electronic Arts, are both well-established, slower-growing games that are showing recent bumps in DAU. It’s hard to tell at the moment, but they may lose some of their gains by next week. YoVille, by Zynga, also shows a bump in DAU, despite its ongoing loss of monthly active users.

Bubble Island and Tiki Resort, by comparison, are both more recent games, from wooga and Playdom respectively. They’ve also both hit this list more than one week running, driven by strong growth and good player retention. We’ll expect to see these two in coming weeks, as well.

Finally, skip over the next four games to Farm Town, the Slashkey game that started the Facebook farming craze. It’s interesting to see it appear here; Slashkey has been losing players since Zynga showed up with FarmVille. But although it’s continuing to shed occasional players, the game appears to be shoring up its regular player base.

Devoted game designers may feel like giving up the profession when they see the top entry on this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by monthly active users (MAU). How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT, the entire aim of which is to type the ABCs quickly, may just be the simplest game since cow-tipping, with a similar lack of staying power after the few first moments of amusement.

That’s just our judgment, of course, and over a million people disagree, based on the proportion of five-star reviews the game is getting. And whatever its flaws, How Fast Are You?! does serve to illustrate one of the core precepts of design on Facebook: games can get away with a bare-bones interface as long as they pull off a single addictive feature well.

The addictive feature in this case is not typing the alphabet, it’s posting the time score to your wall — and all of your friends’ walls — to create a kindergarten-esque rivalry. Anyway, here’s the rest of the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT	1,915,222	+833,647	+43.53
2.	FarmVille	83,127,751	+561,878	+0.68
3.	My City Life	3,908,234	+537,319	+13.75
4.	Bubble Island	1,206,844	+477,796	+39.59
5.	PetVille	19,619,857	+475,914	+2.43
6.	Tiki Resort	1,349,205	+453,493	+33.61
7.	Ninja Saga	3,926,247	+453,121	+11.54
8.	MindJolt Games	19,925,788	+398,103	+2.00
9.	SPP Ranch!	2,574,025	+322,755	+12.54
10.	School of Wizardry	2,489,563	+314,209	+12.62
11.	My Town	3,310,758	+285,824	+8.63
12.	Zoo World	20,312,073	+250,609	+1.23
13.	Glamble	360,767	+247,387	+68.57
14.	Jeux Gratuits	242,236	+242,176	+99.98
15.	MMA Pro Fighter	526,034	+226,629	+43.08
16.	Roulette Madness	953,828	+220,823	+23.15
17.	Texas HoldEm Poker	27,280,073	+213,572	+0.78
18.	Country Life	8,558,831	+208,351	+2.43
19.	Bejeweled Blitz	10,492,337	+197,576	+1.88
20.	Towner	447,330	+186,006	+41.58

Through the entire list, MAU growth is about half of what it was last week. FarmVille, which has led the rankings for several weeks, has finally dropped down to number two with only half a million new users.

Third is My City Life, which has done quite well since we reviewed its new class of SimCity-style games in mid-February. It’s followed by Bubble Island, a Wooga game that adds social features to the classic bubble-blasting concept — if you lose a life to falling bubbles, it can be regenerated by getting your friends to play.

We’ll pass over the next few places to land on MindJolt Games, which offers users a large catalog of licensed games, at number eight. As we recently reported, a team of ex-MySpace execs bought MindJolt for an undisclosed sum in the tens of millions range. Judging only by MindJolt’s current numbers on Facebook (there’s also a website), the acquirers paid over a dollar per user.

But it’s also interesting to see that MindJolt, which had not gained many users for a few months before the deal, began growing again shortly before the acquisition. Now each week it adds a couple percentage points to its total fairly reliably. Chances are, a new growth strategy was put in place before the acquisition was announced — and whatever it is, it’s working.

Despite our title, the actual top app on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook games is Mafia Wars Weekly Loot Collection, a parasite on Zynga’s Mafia Wars. As we mention over on Inside Facebook, this isn’t the first time a Zynga ripoff has been so successful, but we don’t expect it to last for long before getting shut down.

Following Loot Collection, there are several very solid up-and-coming games to look at. Here are all 20:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Mafia Wars Weekly Loot Collection	948,844	+881,596	+92.91
2.	Towner	374,480	+300,446	+80.23
3.	Roulette Madness	941,105	+266,594	+28.33
4.	Glamble	330,973	+235,535	+71.16
5.	Poker Madness	870,977	+233,957	+26.86
6.	MMA Pro Fighter	500,745	+233,384	+46.61
7.	Capitales del mundo!	620,756	+203,713	+32.82
8.	Jewel Puzzle 2	463,724	+155,232	+33.48
9.	Mahjongg Dimensions	551,115	+151,073	+27.41
10.	Okey Oyna	755,140	+139,714	+18.50
11.	Funflow	694,495	+132,088	+19.02
12.	Jumping Dog	501,583	+126,951	+25.31
13.	VIP Challenge	483,558	+126,618	+26.18
14.	Farkle 2	535,710	+119,575	+22.32
15.	Youtopia	669,005	+113,245	+16.93
16.	Puzzle Bobble	287,013	+97,631	+34.02
17.	Armies	545,526	+96,658	+17.72
18.	JibJab	305,395	+96,609	+31.63
19.	Yes Or No ?	225,329	+89,703	+39.81
20.	Ciudad en el Cielo	750,575	+84,762	+11.29

Towner, the number two game here, is a SimCity-style town builder. A couple weeks back we wrote about this new category of games on Facebook, but at the time there were only two that had achieved any measurable success, My City Life and My Town. They’ve since been joined by several more, including Towner, which is by an unlisted developer.

Numbers three and five, Roulette Madness and Poker Madness, are by the same developer and also appeared on this list last week. Sandwiched between them is Glamble, a Texas Hold’em game. All three of these are gambling games that give older successes like Texas HoldEm Poker in terms of their attractive design. All of them are also by independent developers.

MMA Pro Fighter has waited some time for its chance to break out; we first reviewed the Digital Chocolate game back in December. As we mentioned at the time, MMA Pro is a pretty basic Mafia Wars-style game, but the developer has added features to the basic mix, and appears to be continuing work to make the game better.

Jewel Puzzle 2 is basically Bejeweled, but that hasn’t kept the game from appearing on this list both weeks since its launch; the growth appears to be picking up. And finally, there’s Mahjongg Dimensions by Arkadium. The Flash developer’s partnership with Mob Science seems to be working out pretty well, as this 3D mahjongg game is growing steadily toward a million users.

Gains are down a bit this week on our AppData list of top movers by growth in daily average users (DAU). Otherwise, it’s a pretty average week, with the usual mix of developers, mostly large. However, Facebook removed notifications on Monday and this could be starting to affecting traffic — we’ll be tracking the impact.

PetVille, by Zynga, leads off the list. In fact, Zynga has led both our weekly DAU and monthly average user charts for several weeks with one app or another. But it’s interesting to contrast the gains the developer’s different games are making.

FarmVille, for instance, has repeatedly lead our MAU chart with millions of new monthly users, but has yet to make an appearance for DAU gains. PetVille or Texas HoldEm, on the other hand, are doing better at adding new daily users.

Anyway, take a look at all 20:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	PetVille	5,278,982	+548,611	+10.39
2.	Zoo World	2,646,777	+528,548	+19.97
3.	Mafia Wars	6,748,137	+311,777	+4.62
4.	MindJolt Games	3,305,651	+287,834	+8.71
5.	Birthday Cards	2,092,351	+241,275	+11.53
6.	Bubble Island	244,197	+149,250	+61.12
7.	Tiki Resort	249,100	+145,846	+58.55
8.	Country Life	2,710,420	+144,347	+5.33
9.	Is Cool	666,327	+84,634	+12.70
10.	MMA Pro Fighter	87,696	+60,729	+69.25
11.	Glamble	74,612	+57,290	+76.78
12.	Happy Island	3,226,107	+55,365	+1.72
13.	How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT	203,019	+48,025	+23.66
14.	Hug Me	244,074	+46,319	+18.98
15.	Friends For Sale!	574,131	+44,041	+7.67
16.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,177,174	+42,201	+0.68
17.	Music Pets	50,445	+39,209	+77.73
18.	開心寶貝	613,094	+26,146	+4.26
19.	Kingdoms of Camelot	228,247	+25,584	+11.21
20.	Farkle 2	125,245	+24,241	+19.35

RockYou has jumped back onto this week’s list with Zoo World and Birthday Cards. The two seemed ready to take up permanent residence about a month ago, but then backslid a bit. Their gains this week are actually a recovery from an earlier dip.

While we’re pointing out big developers with uneven DAU growth, we’ll take time to mention one that’s not listed above at all: Slide. One would think that after Slide’s meteoric growth in monthly users it would also appear here, but its games — including SuperPoke! Pets, SPP Ranch! and Top Fish — haven’t been converting many monthly users to daily ones.

MindJolt Games, the catalogue of a few hundred mini-games, is yet another big app, but in its case the news is all good: both its MAU and DAU are up.

The news is also pleasant for Tiki Resort, the new island building app from Playdom, and Happy Island, by CrowdStar. The latter has been out longer, and its percentage gains are pretty slim, but it has showed up reliably for several weeks.

We’ll close out with two more apps: MMA Pro Fighter from Digital Chocolate, and Glamble. The first is an older mixed martial arts fighting RPG that never grew much, the second a new Texas Hold’em game. At the rate both are taking off now, it looks like we’ll get to see them again on our Friday list of emerging games; but even if they don’t make an appearance there, they’re probably worth keeping an eye on.

We’ve been talking a lot about Slide recently, and for good reason. After staying pretty flat for months at around 20 million monthly active users, Slide’s growth started to explode a few weeks ago. Since February 14th, the company has doubled its MAU to almost 40 million, of whom over five million are daily active users.

What happened? A combination of Facebook’s redesign, plus some cross-promotion, a little advertising, and the clever use of viral features. We talked with Keith Rabois, Slide’s vice president of business development and strategy, to get some background.

FunSpace has grown the most since mid-February. On the 16th, it was still at 4.5 million MAU; today it accounts for about half of Slide’s MAU, at 21.7 million MAU. It is focused on sharing videos and other content. This is generally what Facebook wants to enable, and its own data reflects the trend.

Our regular readers will notice that around two weeks elapsed between Facebook’s design changes in early February and the explosion in growth for FunSpace. This is where Slide’s viral tactic comes in, a method Rabois describes as letting users share videos with a lot of friends in a way that follows Facebook’s developer policies.

Besides FunSpace, most of Slide’s other apps also involve content sharing, of sorts, and this may be helping them grow, too.

Cute mammal-caring games like SuperPoke! Pets, SPP Ranch! and SuperPocus, and aquarium game Top Fish are more virtual worlds than games. Slide began testing out virtual marketplaces in some of these apps in January, letting users create their own virtual goods, sell them and make money, similar to aspects of virtual worlds like Second Life and IMVU.

In January, Rabois says that users made $160,000 on their creations. To expand the model, Slide will need to manage fraud and provide creation tools but the results so far suggest that the effort would be worth it. The company already offers virtual goods creation tools, the marketplace and ecosystem features designed for user-created goods, like a method for selecting the best user creations and promoting a limited number to other users. So far, so good — we’ll be watching to see if other application developers adopt similar virtual goods marketplace.

While none of the apps are seeing nearly as much growth as FunSpace, they are all growing — partly due to cross-promotion from FunSpace, it seems. Still, SPP Ranch!’s traffic was already on the way up, according to AppData. Slide doesn’t spend much on advertising, so on top of the other reasons mentioned, the virtual goods marketplace — and the profusion of additional goods that players are getting access to — could be playing a role in drawing making the apps more popular.

Overall, Slide’s combination of content-sharing apps and virtual world-style games seems to be helping it gain more users, and monetize them. Having been one of the largest developers on Facebook since the platform launched in 2007, its reach, experience and funding — and its range of growing apps — put it in a promising position to build its business.

Gains are steady on this Monday’s AppData list of Facebook games gaining the most monthly active users (MAU). Many of the same names we saw last week remain in the upper rankings, with a slight bump in growth for every place except number one, which is once again held by Zynga’s FarmVille.

Despite FarmVille’s placing and the presence of Texas HoldEm Poker further down, another company has for once gotten more users overall than Zynga. This week it’s Slide, with four games spread across the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	82,848,181	+1,722,395	+2.08
2.	MindJolt Games	19,115,565	+1,314,904	+6.88
3.	SPP Ranch!	2,421,486	+1,090,883	+45.05
4.	SuperPoke! Pets	3,452,936	+1,083,085	+31.37
5.	How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT	1,311,899	+1,037,264	+79.07
6.	My City Life	3,550,633	+1,006,568	+28.35
7.	Send Glitter!	1,348,798	+660,575	+48.98
8.	Ninja Saga	3,638,138	+627,330	+17.24
9.	Texas HoldEm Poker	26,883,830	+618,835	+2.30
10.	SuperPocus	606,518	+606,518	+100.00
11.	Roulette Madness	834,263	+464,171	+55.64
12.	Okey Oyna	686,480	+463,109	+67.46
13.	Happy Island	12,118,704	+412,245	+3.40
14.	Capitales del mundo!	494,529	+402,649	+81.42
15.	Poker Madness	773,315	+402,060	+51.99
16.	Bejeweled Blitz	10,381,893	+382,988	+3.69
17.	Bubble Island	647,058	+370,784	+57.30
18.	Top Fish	1,345,653	+363,067	+26.98
19.	Tiki Resort	786,098	+357,059	+45.42
20.	開心農場 2	1,260,922	+325,481	+25.81

Before anything by Slide, there’s MindJolt Games at number two. This app (a catalogue of games) had a reliable but static userbase of about 16 million MAU up until the second week of February. That’s when it began to grow again. It has since added over two and a half million new users, for a total a gain of 16 percent since February 9th. Its growth accelerated significantly this week.

Slide’s placements start at numbers three and four with SPP Ranch! and SuperPoke! Pets, and carry on with 10 and 18, which are held by SuperPocus and Top Fish. In total, the imaginary creatures of these games racked up 3,143,553 new players for Slide in a single week. But that doesn’t even come close to Slide FunSpace’s 8.7 million new players, which we cover today on Inside Facebook.

Next up is How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT, a “game” that takes the banal to the point of originality, if that’s possible. The aim it to type the ABCs as quickly as possible — and that’s it. Friends can compete with each other to be fastest, which is the source of the growth. Like several other simple apps we’ve seen recently, it has an internal link promoting RockYou’s Zoo World.

My City Life and Ninja Saga are both notable for being built by single-game independents. Aside from that they’re about as dissimilar as possible. My City Life is somewhere between FarmVille and SimCity, while Ninja Saga is an RPG that lets friends fight each other’s ninjas.