Farmville, Top Facebook Games Continue To Shed Users

Many of Facebook's most popular games are continuing to hemorrhage millions of users, with FarmVille alone losing 7.7 million players in the past month, since the social network implemented changes to its app notifications. Their troubles stem from Facebook's decision three months ago to limit application notifications, which many developers relied on for the viral growth of their titles, in an effort to make interactions with apps "more streamlined, clear, and less spammy for users". As a result, 23 of the top 25 social games on Facebook (determined by monthly active users) forfeited users in May, and 12 of those saw an exodus of at least one million players. Zynga's FarmVille, the most popular app on the social network, suffered the biggest losses as it surrendered over 7.7 million gamers just last month. That's even worse than the farming sim's numbers for April, when the game relinquished 4.4 million players. FarmVille is now down to around 69 million monthly active users, a sharp drop from its peak of around 85 million gamers in March. Other Zynga titles are shedding users by the millions, too: Cafe World lost 5.2 million players, Mafia Wars lost 2.8 milllion, PetVille lost 3.6, FishVille lost 3.6 million, and YoVille lost 1.2 million, according to a report from Inside Social Games. Zynga isn't the only developer hurt by the app notification changes, as Playfish's Pet Society lost 2 million users, CrowdStar's Happy Aquarium lost 4 million, RockYou's Zoo World lost 2.8 million, Playdom's Social City lost 1.1 million, Country Life lost close to 1.2 million, and Slashkey's Farm Town lost 1.7 million. The only title in Facebook's top 25 that seemed to gain a significant amount of monthly active players is Mindjolt Games, a portal for more than a thousand casual titles, as it picked up more than 2.8 million users -- making up for its huge loss of almost 8 million gamers in April.