The Ville rises to the top while other Zynga games falter

Every other week, Gamasutra examines the most popular Facebook games according to monthly active users, looking at the top titles and developers on the social network to see who's attracting or losing players. Zynga's The Ville continues to draw an astounding amount of new players, and it's now the most popular game and app on Facebook with nearly 55 million monthly users -- 22 million more than it had just two weeks ago. The game has totally left behind its nearest competitor, Texas HoldEm Poker, which has been the biggest game on the social network ever since other Zynga staples like CityVille and FarmVille have gone into decline. With the exception of Texas HoldEm Poker, all of Zynga's older games in the top ten (those that aren't The Ville or Bubble Safari) have shed a considerable amount of players in the past two weeks. CityVille has lost 700,000 users, FarmVille has lost half a million, CastleVille has lost 1.1 million, and the once extremely popular Draw Something (an app that connects to the mobile game, not a game itself) has lost 1.7 million. Outside of the top ten, Zynga's Hidden Chronicles and Words with Friends both have shrinking userbases, too. Meanwhile, newcomers like Social Point's Dragon City and Song Pop are steadily growing their audiences and rising up the Facebook Apps Leaderboard. You can see the full list of the top 20 Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts below: All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site AppData.