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Farmville, Top Facebook Games Continue To Shed Users
by Eric Caoili [PC]
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June 4, 2010
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Many of Facebook's most popular games are continuing to hemorrhage millions of users, with FarmVille alone losing 7.7 million players in the past month, since the social network implemented changes to its app notifications.
Their troubles stem from Facebook's decision three months ago to limit application notifications, which many developers relied on for the viral growth of their titles, in an effort to make interactions with apps "more streamlined, clear, and less spammy for users".
As a result, 23 of the top 25 social games on Facebook (determined by monthly active users) forfeited users in May, and 12 of those saw an exodus of at least one million players. Zynga's FarmVille, the most popular app on the social network, suffered the biggest losses as it surrendered over 7.7 million gamers just last month.
That's even worse than the farming sim's numbers for April, when the game relinquished 4.4 million players. FarmVille is now down to around 69 million monthly active users, a sharp drop from its peak of around 85 million gamers in March.
Other Zynga titles are shedding users by the millions, too: Cafe World lost 5.2 million players, Mafia Wars lost 2.8 milllion, PetVille lost 3.6, FishVille lost 3.6 million, and YoVille lost 1.2 million, according to a report from Inside Social Games.
Zynga isn't the only developer hurt by the app notification changes, as Playfish's Pet Society lost 2 million users, CrowdStar's Happy Aquarium lost 4 million, RockYou's Zoo World lost 2.8 million, Playdom's Social City lost 1.1 million, Country Life lost close to 1.2 million, and Slashkey's Farm Town lost 1.7 million.
The only title in Facebook's top 25 that seemed to gain a significant amount of monthly active players is Mindjolt Games, a portal for more than a thousand casual titles, as it picked up more than 2.8 million users -- making up for its huge loss of almost 8 million gamers in April.
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@ Josh Green - I noticed that grammar mistake, too.
I agree that social games are here to stay, but Farmville and similar games are a fad on their way out. People flocked to them because basically they were the only popular ones out there. Now that the masses are beginning to realize these game require more and more work, with an unforgiving schedule that they _can't_ adjust to fit their real life, they will drop out and look for more flexible, undemanding social games.
But the big question is, will the game makers realize this and try to make better, different games? Or will they keep coming out with "Me Too" copies of dying formulas? My money is on the latter. Last year I pitched a few dozen different social gaming ideas to companies that have a strong presence on facebook, and the responses I received could all be summed up as "If it's not the same as farmville, we're not interested."
A lot of those losses are due to the facebook vs Zynga cat fight IMO. With facebook intentionally breaking their API's, and even just turning off Zynga's games for periods of time a lot of frustration was created for the players caught in the crossfire.
One of the biggest changes to how these games are played was the removal of application filters from the news feed. Now instead of looking at only farmville posts, you have to scroll through all the normal feed messages to find them. That I suspect is what is killing the viral nature of the games. People simply can't be bothered to sort through so many posts to find the ones specific to the game they're playing, so they just don't bother. Then without that social aspect, they lose interest in the game.
Facebook needs to just solve the whole spam problem once and for all by creating a separate game / app feed that can be filtered to show 1 app at a time. Maybe include some kind of highlights or summary in with the news feed so the games don't just disappear for non-players.
so now that zynga only converts approx. (guesstimation based on current free-to-play market place trends) 1% of 69M @ $5 per month + the ongoing Ad rev., they aren't doing well.
i think what's happening here is a bit of saturation as well as competition. this is more than natural and the same thing occurs in the console world. players are now sharing their time with other games...as the other games are finally showing up. we can analyze as much as we want, but i really think we are just seeing a form of natural selection going on here.
@ Jeferson Soler: so in other words its a fad :). what was once a fun time waster is now just work.
I never understood why there was so much money investment in that title ...
I can understand if you don’t like social games and that’s your right, but don’t limit the game category nor treat it as if it is a fad just because of one game (as well as games similar to that one game). Not all social games are demanding, like FarmVille, and people would still play social games that are more flexible and less demanding than FarmVille. Not to mention, social games do not equal a game with the same mechanics as FarmVille. Zynga's version of the poker game is a proof of that. Sometimes, it seems to me that some people define social games as something similar to FarmVille; however, that's not really true and it doesn't have to be this way, as FarmVille does not speak for the entire game category (even though it is the most popular of the social games). Unfortunately, it seems that some people believe otherwise, especially game makers. Paul Lenoue spoke a huge truth about some game makers with the “me too” attitude, trying to do a game that is similar to FarmVille instead of doing a fresh, new social game that’s fun, less time-demanding, and different from FarmVille. I understand that the “me too” attitude is the norm within the game industry, but it would be nice to see game makers get out of the comfort zone more often and avoid being repetitive when it comes to social games. In any case, the social games category is pretty much here to stay and is far from a fad, in my opinion; having said that, I’ll admit that the social game category will eventually get to a comfort zone in regard to popularity (like Pokemon) and I’ll agree with you that FarmVille itself might be fad, but that wouldn’t have been the case if the game wasn’t so time-demanding (among other things). By the way, I personally would like to see a game development team get bold and attempt to do a social game with a platform game flare (like making a social game version of Final Fight or Gauntlet). Since there are already some people that play online games with their friends anyway, then why can’t some game companies try and create a social game that plays like a “traditional” home/portable console game or like an arcade game?
hahaha x4
I'm also going to agree that the games are the fad, and I think we're going to see a continual slide in players in many of the games while others come up in the ranks. World of Warcraft brought in the mass popularity of MMOs. FarmVille did the same for Facebook gaming.