Less than a month we wrote that Facebook had just trademarked FishVille. Weeks later the company is officially launching FishVille. Happy Aquarium, the application which FishVille is based on, is now the 5th largest application on the Facebook Platform. Given Happy Aquarium’s presence, I’d expect to see FishVille advertisements all over Facebook.
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It’s a good month for Zynga. The company has one game which continues to thrive as the largest Facebook application ever and has a second application, Café World, which has raced up the charts in just a couple weeks. Playfish, now the second largest developer, also has had a great month with close to 20 percent growth, however it hasn’t been able to match Zynga who is simply dominating the Facebook platform.
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Zynga doesn’t stop growing. The company, which now owns 6 of the top 10 Facebook applications, has watched it’s latest application, Café World, leap up the charts in just over a week. It’s now the second largest game on Facebook in terms of daily active users and the tenth largest game in terms of monthly active users. With such a large number of daily users, it appears that Zynga has another hit on their hands.
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At the beginning of June I wrote about the new Facebook XBox integration, and according to a number of sources, the beta is going live later this month with the full release coming by November 17th. So what does this mean for the future of gaming? It simply means that we’ll see further integration between console games and the social stream.
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Playdom, one of the leading social gaming networks, announced today that they are launching a line of prepaid cards that will soon be available at Target, Walgreens, and 7-11. If you had any doubt that the social gaming space has become a big business, this should make things clear. The cards will now be available at more than 150,000 retail locations and can be used to purchase in-game currency on Mobsters and Sorority Life, two of Playdom’s largest games.
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An interesting take on the Mob Wars genre is a new game which lets you battle Al-Qaeda terrorists. The game, called “Al-Qaeda Wars“, was developed by Rage on Gaming, a company dedicated to making what appears to be relatively violent games. The company’s website includes a number of demo clips. One is of a terrorist blowing up the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the other is simply a man opening a package and getting shot in the head.
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Over the weekend I wrote about the “massive protests” taking place in Zynga’s virtual world YoVille. I kind of poked at the protesters in the article because they are the vocal minority. When you’re in the midst of a protest it appears as if everybody is protesting. The new changes were controversial for those users who had spent time and money on the game over the past year or two. The main issue was that users are now forced to return to the game on a timed basis in order to earn revenue. I’m still not convinced it’s an unfair adjustment.
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YoVille, one of the largest virtual worlds on Facebook, recently experienced a relatively large protest against a major change yesterday which modified the way users can earn virtual currency. Previously, users entered a widget factory from where they could earn coins. While users can still earn coins there is a new process in which users must spend money to make money (as is typical in the real world). A number of users are furious and in the past few hours I’ve received numerous users frustrated with the change.
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Today Zynga, the leading gaming company on Facebook, blew past the 100 million monthly active users level through their network of games. Much of the support has come from FarmVille which is not only the company’s largest game, but also the largest application on Facebook by an extremely large margin. FarmVille should also become the largest application ever on the Facebook application within the next day or two, surpassing the “How Well Do You Know Me?” application’s previous record of 35,554,755 monthly active users.
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Under a month after writing about Zynga surpassing the 60 million user mark, the company has now grown beyond 80 million monthly active users. A large portion of Zynga’s success is a result of their FarmVille application which is about to become the largest application on the platform at some point next week. While some companies have developed highly successful applications (LivingSocial was the largest application on the platform ever), no companies on Facebook have as large of a portfolio as Zynga does.
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