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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Remember Castlevania for the Nintendo? That was the hottest game out 20 years ago! Konami, the company behind Castlevania, Dance Dance Revolution (also an awesome game), and numerous other console games is looking to get into the social gaming space. The company has launched Konami Play to leverage their existing game assets. The company has already launched Facebook Connect integration and plans on launching a virtual currency which leverages a sweepstakes incentive structure in the coming weeks.
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FarmTown users have been going crazy this afternoon as the application has become inaccessible to millions of users around the world. FarmTown is currently the most popular game on Facebook according to daily active users and it continues to grow at around 2 percent, or upwards of 300,000 new users per day. So what are the users doing while Farm Town is down? They are refreshing the application to see if it’s back up of course!
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Two days ago I was taking a look at some of the top games on Facebook and stumbled across Bejeweled Blitz. I had been seeing a number of Bejeweled Blitz stories pop up in my feed but with thousands of feed stories a day, it didn’t really grab my attention. It’s a good thing I waited until recently to check it out because I just wasted hours of my life playing the game. It is seriously addictive!
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Zynga has been expanding the gap between them and competing developers now with over 60 million monthly active users when adding up the users across all their games. Playfish, the second largest application developer, has 35 million monthly active users, an impressive number however it’s still far from 60 million. So how does Zynga have such a dominant position on the platform?
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While there are many uses for Facebook, the most popular use of the site within applications has become games by a large margin. 7 of the top 10 non-Facebook applications based on daily active users are all games and the trend continues on down the Facebook application leaderboard. I’ve been speaking with a number of new developers who are looking to build successful applications and I keep emphasizing the importance of integrating some sort of game feature.
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In the past few days, Zynga, the leading Facebook platform developer, quietly released a new game called “FarmVille”. If you’ve played Farm Town at any point in the past few months then you won’t need any education about how to use Zynga’s version of the game as it’s almost an exact duplicate. The only feature the company needs is the ability to import the game from Farm Town over to FarmVille and they’ll have come up with a great tool to take over the users.
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