New data from Facebook app tracker AppData this week shows that Playdom has edged out competitor Crowdstar to become the third-largest developer of Facebook games, as measured by number of monthly average users across all published games. Playdom's 43.8 million users just edged out CrowdStar's 43.3 million, according to the site.
While massive player gains for new Playdom games such City of Wonder and Market Street helped fuel the company's achievement, a precipitous drop in users for CrowdStar's games also contributed to the switch in positions. The Happy Aquarium maker lost more than 9 million aggregate monthly users for its games in the last week, though the bulk of the drop came in a single day (Aug. 27), suggesting it may have had more to do with changes in Facebook's statistics reporting than any actual player exodus.
Regardless, the jump into the top three is good news for Playdom owner Disney, which has seen their acquisition's player base grow by roughly 10% in the month since their purchase. Still, the company will have to grow more than 25% more to challenge the current position of No. 2 developer Electronic Arts, or a whopping 417% if it wants to match industry-leader Zynga's current position.
Earn Money by watching videos
Showing posts with label appdata. Show all posts
Showing posts with label appdata. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
It's Official: CityVille dethrones FarmVille as Zynga's top Facebook game
Alright, so it didn't exactly happen yesterday, but CityVille has soared high above FarmVille's 56.8 million players with a massive (for these days) 61.7 million monthly players. It did what many thought was the impossible in just 22 days, according to Inside Social, and it took good old FarmVille four months to reach that size back in the day. While we've already explored what might have contributed to the game's blindingly fast rise to Zynga supremacy, it's impossible to tell how long this will last.
It will take at least another month for CityVille's numbers to stabilize--or at least slow down, for Pete's sake. These numbers are purely an accumulation of the amount of players who have logged into the game at least once in the past three weeks. Whether the game can hold the interest of its nearly 62 million players for a lengthy period of time has yet to be seen. However, if the game keeps growing at this rate, it could easily meet FarmVille's former glory of 84 million monthly players by 2011. Until then, Mark Pincus and the CityVille team can enjoy their early Christmas gift Scrooge McDuck style.
It will take at least another month for CityVille's numbers to stabilize--or at least slow down, for Pete's sake. These numbers are purely an accumulation of the amount of players who have logged into the game at least once in the past three weeks. Whether the game can hold the interest of its nearly 62 million players for a lengthy period of time has yet to be seen. However, if the game keeps growing at this rate, it could easily meet FarmVille's former glory of 84 million monthly players by 2011. Until then, Mark Pincus and the CityVille team can enjoy their early Christmas gift Scrooge McDuck style.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Facebook updates formula for active users, player numbers plummet
Just before the weekend, Facebook threw everyone for a loop with a new approach to calculating just how "active" monthly active users are of its thousands of apps, namely social games. And as a result, the numbers of monthly active players of just about every Facebook game and developer have dropped significantly. And we say "significantly" because of Facebook's reasoning behind the change.
"Given that most apps work this way, we're changing our active user figures for Apps on Facebook to publicly report the number of users that authenticate with the app," Facebook's Rushi Desai writes. "We believe this shift from "visitors" to "authenticated users" more accurately reflects the usage of an application, and it brings our measurement methodology for apps into alignment with how we measure engagement on Facebook."
What Facebook is essentially saying is that it is no longer counting the users who visit an app or game's Canvas, but refuse to authenticate the app and leave the page before ever entering the game. Instead, Facebook will now only count the amount of users that actively log into the app or game per month.
CityVille MAU
The company goes on to say that the one-time drop will result in a perceived decline in the number of active users of its many social games and apps, but the number of users actually engaging with the apps is unchanged. But that's just it: Regardless of whether the same rough portion of players have been "actively engaging" with games like CityVille this month, this still means that nearly 20 million people merely visited the app in the last month and did not play the game. And that goes for not just CityVille, but Facebook games across the board.
This is certainly a positive change for all, as it promotes a more accurate measure of just how many players are actually playing these still-massive social games. However, the change reveals how many players are actually logging into these games every month as opposed to merely visiting. And no matter how you slice it, the numbers are smaller than previously imagined.
"Given that most apps work this way, we're changing our active user figures for Apps on Facebook to publicly report the number of users that authenticate with the app," Facebook's Rushi Desai writes. "We believe this shift from "visitors" to "authenticated users" more accurately reflects the usage of an application, and it brings our measurement methodology for apps into alignment with how we measure engagement on Facebook."
What Facebook is essentially saying is that it is no longer counting the users who visit an app or game's Canvas, but refuse to authenticate the app and leave the page before ever entering the game. Instead, Facebook will now only count the amount of users that actively log into the app or game per month.
CityVille MAU
The company goes on to say that the one-time drop will result in a perceived decline in the number of active users of its many social games and apps, but the number of users actually engaging with the apps is unchanged. But that's just it: Regardless of whether the same rough portion of players have been "actively engaging" with games like CityVille this month, this still means that nearly 20 million people merely visited the app in the last month and did not play the game. And that goes for not just CityVille, but Facebook games across the board.
This is certainly a positive change for all, as it promotes a more accurate measure of just how many players are actually playing these still-massive social games. However, the change reveals how many players are actually logging into these games every month as opposed to merely visiting. And no matter how you slice it, the numbers are smaller than previously imagined.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)