Fastest-Growing Facebook Games: Sims Social Approaching 30M Users

[Every other week, Gamasutra examines the fastest-growing Facebook games (according to monthly active users), looking at which titles and developers are having the most success attracting new players on the social network.] As has been the case for most of the past month, Electronic Arts and Playfish's The Sims Social, their Facebook adaptation of the popular life-simulation series, is the fastest growing application and game this week, reached nearly 30 million players.  Just three weeks since its formal launch (and about a month after its open beta began), The Sims Social has become the fifth biggest game in terms of audience size on Facebook. More than 7.5 million users of its 30 million count started playing in the past week. Ubisoft's The Smurfs & Co is again the second biggest gainer, now at 9.7 million monthly players. This social game version of the classic comic/cartoon franchise and recent feature film drew in almost 1.7 million users in the last seven days. At #3, Zynga staple FarmVille welcomed 1.1 million virtual farmers for a 9.7 million total. Wooga's Magic Land, which launched in mid-August, takes #4 and appears to be picking up somewhat, gaining 873,558 new players in the last week for a 2.6 million total. Chinese firm MiniMax's 水果忍者 (literally "Fruit Ninja"), which shares more than a few features with Australian developer Halfbrick Studios' big mobile app of the same name, is at #5 after adding 745,679 new users for a 1.3 million total. Kama's The Pokerist Club takes #6 (+741,451 users; 4.6 million total), followed by Wooga's Diamond Dash (+711,625 users; 11.1 million total), Game Insight's Mystery Manor (+490,528 users; 11.1 million total), and Disney/Playdom's Gnometown (+481,959 users; 3.3 million total). And closing out the top ten, DoubleDown Interactive's DoubleDown Casino has 477,916 new card players and a 3.6 million total. The full list of the top 20 fastest growing Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts, are as follows: All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site AppData.