[
Every other week, Gamasutra examines 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.]
Since Facebook
changed how it counts active users for its applications earlier this month, audience numbers for many titles on the social network have taken a nosedive, especially for the site's most popular games from Zynga and other top developers.
Zynga's long dominant
CityVille, for example, is no longer the most popular application on Facebook -- that's now Mensing's Static HTML: iFrame Tabs tool for customizing user profile pages, boasting around 62.1 million monthly active users.
CityVille is still the biggest game on the community, though, as it has 55.2 million players. That's a sharp drop from the 76.1 million it had just two weeks ago before Facebook enacted these changes to "more accurately [reflect] the usage of" apps.
The Sims Social from Electronic Arts and PlayFish is at #2, and has 40.2 million users, which is still impressive considering it launched two months ago, but it's more than 20 million less than the 66.2 million players it reported fourteen days ago.
Four Zynga titles follow:
Texas HoldEm Poker at 29.3 million users (down from 31.6 million),
FarmVille at 27.9 million (down from 35.1 million),
Empires & Allies at 20.5 million (down from 26.8 million), and
Adventure World at 15.4 million (down from 37.6 million).
Adventure World, the most recently launched Zynga game, debuting in early September, was placed at #3 before Facebook changed its counting methodology and was seeing rapid growth, but it's now fallen to the #6 spot.
Disney's
Gardens of Time is #7 at 10.9 million users (down from 14.4 million). After that there's Zynga's
Words with Friends at 10.6 million (down from 12.5 million), and Wooga's
Diamond Dash at 10.1 million (down from 12.4 million) and
Bubble Island at 9.1 million (down from 10.3 million).
You can see the full list of the top 20 Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts below:
All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site
AppData.
