Analysis: MAU For Top Facebook Games, Zynga Titles Declining In February

Many of Facebook's most popular games, including leading Zynga hits like CityVille and FrontierVille, saw a decline in monthly active user numbers in the past month. In February 2011, 16 of the 25 games on Facebook with the biggest audiences lost monthly players -- while daily user counts are thought to serve as a better measure for a title's monetizing capabilities, monthly user numbers can still give an indication of a game's rising or sinking popularity. Zynga's CityVille, for instance, remains the biggest game on the social network with 94.9 million monthly users at the end of February but lost 3.6 million players in four weeks. FarmVille also took a loss of 2.7 million monthly users, bringing it down to 50.6 million. Texas Hold'Em Poker, also from Zynga, added over half a million users to its total of 37.9 million and is the third most popular Facebook game, but other titles from the developer like FrontierVille (-4.8 million monthly, 19.4 million tota) and Cafe World (-1.5 million monthly, 15 million total) fared worse. Zynga's Mafia Wars (-3.7 million monthly, 12.7 million total) and Treasure Isle (-1.9 million monthly, 11.3 milion total) also suffered in February. You can see the changes in audience sizes for all of Facebook's top 25 games in this chart posted by Inside Social Games, which compiled the data. Non-Zynga games like Digital Chocolate's Millionaire City (-475,000 monthly users, 11.9 million total), MindJolt Games (-610,000 monthly users, 8.3 million total), and CrowdStar's Happy Aquarium (-807,000 monthly users, 7.9 million total) took substantial losses, too. Despite Zynga's (and several others') troubles, there were a few titles that managed to grow their userbases last month, though. LOLapps' Ravenwood Fair picked up an impressive 3.7 million players (10.9 million total), and CrowdStar's It Girl added 1.2 million users (9.2 million total).