Top Facebook Games Slow Audience Shrinkage

Every other week, we examine 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. Though many of Facebook's most popular games are continuing to shed users -- likely due to changes the social network made last March to restrict application notification spam -- their losses aren't nearly as huge as they've been in the past several months, for the most part. The user count for Zynga's FarmVille, the most popular app on the site, continued to slide, now down to 63.9 million players from 66.6 million. The farming sim is way down from its 85 million high last March, and it still gave up 2.7 million users in the past 14 days, but that's much less than the 8.9 million that abandoned the game during the last two-week span. The rest of the top 5, with the exception of RockYou's non-game Birthday Cards, are Zynga titles: Texas HoldEm Poker (#2), Treasure Isle (#3), and Cafe World (#4). The latter two lost 2.5 million users and 1.5 million users respectively, but Texas HoldEm Poker actually picked up around a hundred thousand new players for a total of 28.6 million. Mindjolt Games, the only popular app to see major gains two weeks ago, has kept its streak of luck and climbed a spot to #6 as it added 1.4 million players to its 19.8 million total. Zynga's Mafia Wars Game, though, dropped slightly to #7 as it relinquished nearly 1.3 million monthly active users, now down to 18.9 million. Zynga's PetVille and its rival, Electronic Arts/Playfish's Pet Society, both stayed at #8 and #9 respectively. PetVille, though, lost nearly a million users in the past two weeks, bringing its total to 15.3 million, while Pet Society only lost 561,531 users and is now at 14.8 million. At #10, FishVille, another Zynga title (seven of the top ten most popular titles are from the San Francisco-headquartered developer), parted with 724,891 million aquarium simulation players for a current total of 13.6 million monthly active users. You can see the full list of the top 20 Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts after the break: All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site AppData.