SGN May Own Mob Wars And What That Means For the Social Gaming Industry

Two days ago, VentureBeat released a story indicating that SGN had issued a cease-and-desist order against Mob Wars on the grounds that it was property of SGN since Mob Wars' developer David Maestri was working for SGN at the time of the release of Mob Wars. Meanwhile, Mob Wars has become one of the most popular and profitable games on Facebook.

I'm not going to dwell on the details, you can find there here. I'm more interested in how it affects the social gaming landscape. If it turns out SGN owns Mob Wars how work that affect their overall ranking by installs and active users?

Currently, SGN is the 4th largest company by installs at 46,136,580. One slot above them is Zynga with 54,106,539. Mob Wars has 4,173,000 installs. So even with the addition of Mob Wars, SGN would still remain in the 4th place slot below Slide, Rockyou, and Zynga.

As far as active users, SGN is currently 7th with 703,000 users. Adding Mob Wars' 500,000 users, will nearly double SGN's current traffic bringing them up to 5th with 1.2 million users.

It a recent post on Inside Social Games, SGN's CEO, Shervin Pishevar questioned the value of these aggregate numbers suggesting that they didn't account for user overlap between applications. I agree. I wrote a post back in May raising the same objections. I'll be exploring the topic of overlap soon, once I can figure out a way to pull together some quality data.

Regardless of its value in enlarging SGN's audience, the biggest value of Mob Wars is its revenue stream which has been estimated to be $22,000 dollars a day by Developer Analytics. Mob Wars revenue generating potential dwarfs every other app.

Seems to me, that Mob Wars is worth the fight. Feel free to mock me for stating the obvious.