Any FarmVille (ex or otherwise) players out there?
This popular farming game from giant game developer Zynga gets the number one spot as the mostly played Facebook game for 2010.
I’ve been tracking top Facebook games every month based on monthly/daily active players worldwide (via developerAnalytics) since August of last year. Farmville made its presence felt on September 2009 where it debuted on the number 1 spot ousting then-popular game, Mafia Wars. Ever since, it stayed in its spot for the whole year of 2010 with daily active users averaging 50% more than the always-changing game at number 2.
FarmVille is not the first popular farming game in Facebook. I think that credit goes to the now defunct Farm Town by SlashKey but despite its huge number of followers, it was full of bugs and had a lot of room for improvement. Zynga capitalized on that and when they released a more polished farming game in FarmVille a few months later, it was as an instant hit.
Who knew that tending to virtual crops, creating funky looking farms and buying decorations and helping friends get rid of crows would appeal to the mass? Pet owners, restaurateurs, poker players and even mafia bosses got hooked with farming. I did. I set aside my mafia for a while to live the life of a virtual farmer.
So we have to give it to Zynga for coming up with the most popular Facebook game of the year. I also have to mention that at this point in time, FarmVille is not the top game anymore. It was overtaken by another Zynga game called CityVille which was launched very recently but while we’re still in 2010, FarmVille remains the number one FB game in our books.