Social Gaming Chart - September: DAU is dead, long live MAU.

Recently, I've become suspicious of the data I've been getting from Adonomics, as well as some of the other analytics sites that provide daily active use data. I've confirmed this with a couple of other people in the space, so for the immediate future, I've decided to base my insights on Facebook's monthly users count. Fortunately, Myspace also provides this data. And monthly users is a standard metric used on the internet as a whole so we can make better cross-comparisions between properties on and off the socnets.

Here's an updated list of the top ten games on Facebook according to MAU.

1. (Lil) Green Patch - Ashish Dixit and David King. 6,104,887 monthly active users.

2. Texas HoldEm Poker - Zynga. 5,196,593 monthly active users.

3. Owned! - Coolapps.com. 4,417,398 monthly active users

4. Friends For Sale! - Serious Business. 3,653,035 monthly active users

5. Who Has The Biggest Brain? - Playfish. 3,558,737 monthly active users

6. Bowling Buddies - Playfish. 2,842,029 monthly active users

7. Mob Wars - Mob Wars. 2,715,222 monthly active users

8. Word Challenge - Playfish. 2,640,206 monthly active users

9. YoVille - Zynga. 1,933,267 monthly active users

10. Speed Racing - TripMonger, Inc. 1,822,869 monthly active users

Now here's the list I compiled last week of the top ten games on Facebook that was based on DAU:

1. (lil) Green Patch
2. Texas Holdem Poker - Zynga
3. Friends For Sale - Serious Business
4. Owned - Coolapps/Myyearbook.com
5. Mob Wars
6. Word Challenge - Playfish
7. Bowling Buddies - Playfish
8. Who Has the Biggest Brain? -Playfish
9. Speed Racing - Rockyou
10. Mindjolt Games - Mindjolt Games

As you can see the lists are VERY similar, enough so that I'm happy just to toss DAU under the train and rely on Facebook's monthly numbers.

1 million monthly users = hit game

Looking at the data, over 21 games on Facebooks have over a million monthly active users. I've decided to arbitrarily make that the threshold definition of a hit game.

(lil) Green Patch is #1????

Amazingly, a simple gifting app with extremely lightweight gameplay has bested the efforts of all the major social games companies. Some would argue that (lil) Green Patch isn't even a game. Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about the power of gifting in my next installment of "How to Make a Successful Social Game". Unfortunately, this entry won't be as controversial as the last one.

Top Social Game Companies: Top Ten Myspace Games Vs. Top Ten Facebook Apps

Now that I'm seeing that Myspace has finally arrived as a powerful social gaming platform, I figured I should take a look at who succeeding on that platform vs. who's succeeding on Facebook. Below are the top ten games from both platforms as of Wednesday.

Myspace Top Ten Games
1. Mobsters - unknown
2. Mafia Wars - Zynga
3. Own Your Friends - unknown
4. SuperPets - Rockyou
5. SuperPoke Pets - Slide
6. Texas Holdem Poker - Zynga
7. Vampires - Zynga (reskinned Mob Wars type game, not like Blake Commagere's Vampires)
8. Heroes - unknown
9. Friend Factory - Zynga
10. Dragon Wars - Zynga


Facebook Top Ten Games
1. (lil) Green Patch
2. Texas Holdem Poker - Zynga
3. Friends For Sale - Serious Business
4. Owned - Coolapps/Myyearbook.com
5. Mob Wars
6. Word Challenge - Playfish
7. Bowling Buddies - Playfish
8. Who Has the Biggest Brain? -Playfish
9. Speed Racing - Rockyou
10. Mindjolt Games - Mindjolt Games

Quick note: Unknown could be an indie developer or a company keeping a low profile, it's hard to tell on Myspace.

Looking at Myspace, the top ten is completely dominated by Zynga games. Slide and Rockyou also make an appearance, but other top game developers on Facebook are nowhere to be seen. Playfish, SGN, Serious Business, and Alamofire have yet to make a serious push onto Myspace. I will note that many of the popular Zynga games appear to be rethemed versions of Mob Wars. Re-theming a game engine to serve different interest groups is an approach I've been advocated privately since I had a company. Glad to see someone is doing it.

On Facebook, Playfish dominates. Overall, rankings have been very static for a couple of months. Either developers are moving toward other platforms (some, but not most), none of the new games are any good (doubtful) or perhaps the viral mechanisms in Facebook have been dampened enough that it's much harder to acquire new users (hmm...worth a post...)

It's understandable that many companies are reluctant to develop for two platforms (or more). It diverts resources and focus. Zynga, with their 80+ employees (soon to be 150+) is the only company currently with the scale to do so without suffering much.

Where's the Social Gaming Chart? And why I, and many others, focus on Facebook too much

I decided to make the Social Gaming Chart a monthly feature. Mainly, because not enough interesting things were happening biweekly (and because I forgot to compile the data on Thursday, mea culpa.)

I often feel that games on Facebook get an undue amount of attention by bloggers. I thought about why I spent so much time covering it, while giving interesting developments in the wider web the short shrift. And I realized, it's because there is a leaderboard.

Duh. Any game designer could have told me that had I thought to ask. This is not an essay about the power of a leaderboard, so all I'll say about it is that Playfish's current design model is based around adding a leaderboard to a single-player casual game and look how well they're doing.

Of course, the reason that they're a leaderboard available at all is because Facebook releases the data on all its applications, giving us a reliable and (relatively) unfiltered view of individual successes in context of their peers. Apples to Apples.

On the larger web, we have to rely on data gathered secondhand by Hitwise, Comscore, Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa. None completely reliable, often challenged by companies (who then refuse to share their internal numbers), smaller sites are overlooked, and so we can can only paint an opaque picture. And worse for those companies, we don't have a reliable leaderboard, so bloggers talk about them less.

One of my favorite conference speakers, and I am hardly alone, is Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings. Because he shares his data. Entire business plans are built on the data he shares. If more online game companies were more forthcoming about their traffic, then they'd get a lot more ink and goodwill. Though I doubt blogger goodwill is worth much, and I doubt you can amortize it. (Yes, a financial statements joke. First and last hopefully.)

So kids, if you want to raise your profile as an industry be liberal with your data. I'll be happy to publish it.

Here's a list of charts from other branches of the games industry:
Casual Downloadable games - http://www.casualcharts.com/
PC/Console Games - http://www.vgchartz.com/
Mobile Games - coming soon. Story here. http://www.cellular-news.com/story/31439.php
MMOS - nothing. (http://www.mmogchart.com/)
Virtual Worlds - Kzero is using Alexa data which is the most unreliable of all sources, IMHO.
Flash games - Hey Jameson, Mochi should totally do this. You guys have the data.
Social games (off Facebook) - nothing worthwhile
Casual Games portal - nothing (data aggregated with parent company data)
Casual MMOs - nothing
Other online games - nothing

Let me know if I forgot anything.

Final note: Going to be at Casual Connect all week if anyone wants to chat. bret_terrill at yahoo dot com.

Social Gaming Chart: Bored, yet?

Wow, this chart going to get boring soon, same ten games, slightly difference order.

That in itself is interesting. Apparently, no new game that has been released in the last few weeks has gotten enough traction to reach the top of the charts.

The big boys, SGN and Zynga, have been extremely quiet. Neither have released any new games that have entered my radar (on Facebook, at least). Sorry, except one. SGN did release a game similar to the party game Scattergories that I think has interesting possibilities (probably post about it soon).

Meanwhile, (Lil) Green Patch has risen to be the third most popular game on Facebook. And I'm still not completely convinced its a game. I suspect they are retaining users better since that added an arcade of Flash games to their app. Included is the game Bloons which has been shown to be crazy popular in just about every place it pops up.

Mob Wars also saw pretty amazing growth. 14% in 2 weeks. I predict that Mob Wars will reach #3 sooner than later. However, I don't see Friends For Sale! or Owned leaving the top slots any time soon.

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.

Playfish Dominates the Social Gaming Top Ten

Today, I'm introducing The Social Gaming Chart, a biweekly compilation of the top ten games on the social networks. For now, I'm only covering games on Facebook. Once we see significant traction and easily available metrics for the other socnets, I'll start including them.

The Social Gaming Chart

Note: data was compiled on Thursday, June 5, 2008.

My Take

The social games space is growing. Since I compiled the first social gaming chart just over three months ago, the amount of daily active users of the top ten Facebook games has increased from 2,740,002 to 4,628,872. That's an increase of 69% in three months.

The social games space is changing rapidly. Only three games that were in the top ten three months ago remain: Scrabulous, Texas Holdem Poker, and Speed Racing. All three have fallen in rank, but only Scrabulous lost users. Texas Holdem Poker and Speed Racing gained users. Meanwhile, new companies and game types have replaced and surpassed the old crowd.

The company to watch. Playfish is proving that a company can consistently crank out hit social games. So far, they've released three games (Who's Got the Biggest Brain, Word Challenge, and Bowling Buddies) and each game has reached the top ten. Without cross-promotion!

They've discovered a winning formula: integrate a friends-oriented leaderboard into well-designed single-player flash game based on a proven casual game concept. However, as I suggested in a previous post, I think that games based on this formula will have a shorter shelf-life than games that have direct interaction with your friends(such as Scrabulous and Texas Holdem). Simple single-player games tend to get boring quick. Having said that, people play solitaire for their entire lives, so who knows. But then again, you don't play solitaire with friends.

Regardless, I think Playfish will continue to be successful, pumping out a string of hit games based on this formula. No other company is consistently creating polished, high-quality, flash games for the Facebook audience. I'm interested to see when they'll start releasing multiplayer games, which have more difficult technical requirements. But I doubt they're in any rush.