Zynga Sees Biggest Launch With CityVille, 290,000 Users In 24 Hours

Zynga says CityVille, its latest release and first internationally-launched title, has enjoyed the company's biggest launch ever and picked up 290,000 users in just 24 hours. Since its debut last week, the game has attracted 1.2 million monthly active players. The social game developer's last title to enjoy this type of success was FrontierVille, which gained over 116,000 virtual pioneers in its first day. The online sim has expanded its audience greatly since then and now has over 30 million monthly users. CityVille partially owes its popularity to its multiple localizations in English, German, Italian, Spanish, and French. The company has put more effort behind expanding its global reach recently, creating a Chinese language edition of Texas HoldEm Poker and a Japanese version of FarmVille. Zynga also says that CityVille's initial growth was primarily organic, with most of the 290,000 users coming from players notifying others about the game by inviting friends or posting about it in status updates, according to a report from TechCrunch. The developer hasn't yet rolled out its cross-game marketing strategy for CityVille in games like FarmVille and FrontierVille, though it expects the city-building sim's population to expand significantly once it does.