Are we going to be subjected to a weekly countdown of Farmville numbers? If Facebook had any brains (and balls) they would take 50% of all revenues generated by these so-called (I mean social) games.

I bet Zynga didn't give a shyt. Those are players that will never ever purchase any virtual item with real dough anyway.

I think FarmVille is going to be a prime example of viral marketing and meme management [*], in a few years time. It also suggests that the gameplay in Farmville isn't actually that appealing unless shared with friends and family: without the constant "peer pressure" reminders, people are finding other things to do.



@Tomiko: I'm willing to bet at least some of those 9 million users would have spent some money - at the very least, they've helped to maintain the social "web" for Zynga. It's also worth bearing in mind the context: this is a loss of 9m users in just one month, or around 15% of the active userbase - and it comes on top of the 10m users they've lost in the two months prior. In total, that's around 25% of their userbase gone, in just three months, and with the double-hit to their business model (limited advertising combined with a reduced userbase impacts their ability to attract new players - and there's also the psychological impact of the losses), this downward spiral is likely to continue.



In any case, I think this is something that's definitely worth tracking. Will FarmVille and it's kin die off altogether? Unlikely. Are the player numbers sharply inflated due to (ab)use of an unrestricted marketing system? Probably. Will the company be able to survive? Maybe. Will there be another viral/bubble in the near future? Almost certainly.



[*] Or possibly as a fine example of a pyramid scheme/bubble economy: they only work while there's still room for expansion...

@Jamie

Nope, those people that they lost were just lurkers. They used farmville out of curiosity because of the annoying spams by their friends. They weren't actively using it in the first place. It's the same with software piracy, the number of pirates doesn't directly correlate to lost revenue.

@Tomiko:



The people who were lost still could have brought new people into the Farmville game, and those people could get even more people, and so on. Even if one connection in this web does not spend money in the game, it doesn't mean the connections he/she adds will not. Therefore, a loss of these players still could equal lost money.

Application notifications on Facebook were a form of feedback for the games. Eliminating the notifications is basically the Facebook equivalent of removing sound effects in console games. Are they still playable without them? Yes, but the removal of the feedback can greatly alter the experience of the games.

here's what i think is really going on. the top private publishers cannot claim inflated user #s any longer, because there are 3rd party metric systems that can expose that false data. also, the analytics/metrics are being standardized, improved, and shared in order to capture actual active users. again, this means publishers can't fake #s that are not there. there is much more competition in terms of interesting apps/games now. we're seeing a first big evolution in the casual gamers patterns/habits.



@ tawna, no offense, but your analogy seems extreme. to take away sound from a console game might be akin to removing the notification feature in FV altogether, which has not happened. what happened is that FB doesn’t update all friends of the user who don’t have the app or have not opted in for those email/push notifications.

anyone played frontierville yet? is there any evolved mechanics/features from the previous time/task based mafia wars/FV styles?

I wonder if Brian Reynolds is going to be able to cash in before this fad fizzles and dies.



Frontierville is his "baby" at Zynga. It's just another version of Farmville. Pathetic.