CityVille's Population Reaches 22 Million

Just 11 days after its international launch, Zynga's newest social game CityVille has already reached over 22 million monthly active users and 8.6 million daily users. Last week, the developer said CityVille experienced the biggest launch out of all its titles, picking up some 290,000 players in just 24 hours. Zynga said the game's rapid growth was mostly organic, attributable to players notifying others about CityVille through invites or status updates. CityVille also owes much of its success to its many localized editions, offering language options for English, German, Italian, Spanish, and French. Though Zynga has previously adapted games like Texas HoldEm Poker and FarmVille for other countries, this was its first international launch. Furthermore, Zynga has started rolling out its cross-game marketing strategy, promoting CityVille to its total network of 206 million Facebook monthly users through in-game banner ads. The sim is prominently displayed as "Zynga's Newest Game" alongside icons for its other social titles. The last title the developer launched with this much success was FrontierVille, which has so far gained 30.4 million monthly users. It's currently the third most popular game on Facebook, behind FarmVille (54.5 million monthly users) and Texas HoldEm Poker (33.5 million users). CityVille's growth rate is triple that of FrontierVille's; 12 days after the latter launched in June, the pioneering sim had 7.4 million monthly users, according to a report from Inside Social Games. FarmVille's audience also expanded at a much slower rate despite access to more "viral" channels.