Zynga doesn’t stop growing. The company, which now owns 6 of the top 10 Facebook applications, has watched it’s latest application, Café World, leap up the charts in just over a week. It’s now the second largest game on Facebook in terms of daily active users and the tenth largest game in terms of monthly active users. With such a large number of daily users, it appears that Zynga has another hit on their hands.

The company is also looking to go after another rapidly growing vertical: fishing. Last week the company trademarked “FishVille” in an attempt to go after…

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At the beginning of June I wrote about the new Facebook XBox integration, and according to a number of sources, the beta is going live later this month with the full release coming by November 17th. So what does this mean for the future of gaming? It simply means that we’ll see further integration between console games and the social stream.

While the announcement came over four months ago, many people have been anticipating this new level of integration between the two platforms. This integration also redefines the concept of social gaming. Social games are regularly referred to as a…

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Zynga, the largest social gaming network on Facebook, appears to be testing a new offers platform on their largest applications. Farmville is by far the largest Facebook application ever and it continues to grow with over 43 million users. So how does the most popular application ever generate revenue? Right now the company is using Offerpal as the primary offers monetization platform but as one inquisitive user noticed, the company appears to be testing out a service by a company never heard of before: “DoubleDing”.

My initial thoughts were that Zynga just cut out the middle man and built their…

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Today Zynga, the leading gaming company on Facebook, blew past the 100 million monthly active users level through their network of games. Much of the support has come from FarmVille which is not only the company’s largest game, but also the largest application on Facebook by an extremely large margin. FarmVille should also become the largest application ever on the Facebook application within the next day or two, surpassing the “How Well Do You Know Me?” application’s previous record of 35,554,755 monthly active users.

Based on daily active users, the application is already the largest ever by a large number.…

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Last month I wrote about the fast growing Brain Buddies game which was a remix of “Who Has the Biggest Brain?”, one of Playfish’s top games. Today the developer behind Brain Buddies, wooga, announced that they received funding from none other than Holtzbrinck Ventures, one of the primary investors in StudiVZ, a German Facebook copycat (which was previously sued by Facebook).

I’ve been trying to get information about the size of the investment but the companies are releasing any information. My guess is this is between $500k and the low seven figures given the quality of the company’s first game.…

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Two weeks ago I wrote about Zynga surpassing 60 million monthly active users on Facebook. As of today the company now has over 72 million monthly active users and has the top application on the platform based on daily active users. FarmVille, an application which duplicates many of the features of the second most popular application, Farm Town, has now surpassed 5.3 million daily active users. Growth doesn’t appear to be slowing which isn’t surprising since the company has invested over $1 million in promotion alone.

With almost 50 percent growth in under a month, one has to wonder if…

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They say imitation is the biggest form of flattery, so Playfish should be pretty flattered by German-based Wooga’s latest game: Brain Buddies. The application takes a similar approach to “Who Has the Biggest Brain?” but provides new forms of brain teasers. There are four alternative challenges, one of which is almost identical to one of the challenges in Playfish’s competing application. Right now the most popular strategy for success in the social gaming arena appears to be copy others and then promote.

The result has been multiple legal battles although none of them have resulted in any game changing decision…

This is a guest post by Bill Grosso, the Chief Technology Officer of Twofish.
As the social application space has started to mature, more and more application developers have adopted a “metrics driven” approach to game design. Driven partially by the availability of data gathering and analysis tools, partially by the distributed nature of the internet, and partially by the quick turnaround times that are possible if you analyze customer behaviors in real-time, it seems like almost every aspect of application design has gone under the analytical knife.

Which is why I looked forward to last week’s session on metrics…

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