Pokey Paws its Way into the Social Gaming Chart

Takeaways:

Continued growth. Total daily active users for the top ten games grew by 4% in the last two weeks.

Friends For Sale got its mojo back. It added 78,000+ users in two weeks, pretty good for a game that's been around for 6+ months, and had been struggling recently to hold on to its userbase(recently down 240,000 users from its peak of 800,000). Meanwhile, Owned! lost 50,000+ users, so the gap between the two similar gaps is closing. Siqi, whatever you did is working!

Playfish is still the company to beat. They showed massive growth over the last two weeks, gaining 170,000 users across their three apps.

But the big news is the appearance of Pokey! on the charts. To be fair, Pokey! could have been included in the last Social Gaming Chart, but I didn't feel it was a game. Ah, the vagaries of what constitutes a game. Since I put out that chart, I've spoken to a few people (mostly at the Social Gaming Summit) who felt it was a game. I played "Pokey!" again, and noted their leaderboard where people compete to get bones. *sigh* Maybe a leaderboard is all you need to be a game.

Anyway, the discussion of what makes a game a game is a rathole that I'm trying to avoid crawling in. In the meantime, I'm going to follow the lead of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who says:

"I know it when I see it."

He was talking about obscene pornography...which if you a game developer, I'm sure it's something you're already familiar with.

I meant the Supreme Court ruling, of course.