The Sims Social, Words With Friends Jump Into Most Popular Facebook Games

[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.] The top four Facebook games right now are the same Zynga titles that dominated two weeks ago -- CityVille at #1 with 75.7 million users (down from 76 million), Empires & Allies with 42.6 mllion (down from 44.3 million), Texas HoldEm Poker with 36.6 million (up from 34.8 million), and FarmVille at 34 million (up from 33.6 million). Shooting up to #5, though, is a new game, The Sims Social, Electronic Arts/Playfish's Facebook adaptation of super popular franchise The Sims. After going into open beta in early August and launching a couple of weeks ago, The Sims Social has already picked up nearly 20.1 players -- up from 7.3 million players last week. The Sims Social is also the fastest growing application on Facebook right now, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the series -- since legendary designer Will Wright and developer Maxis debuted The Sims in 2000, the life simulation games have sold 140 million copies worlwide. Zynga's The Pioneer Trail, an expansion for FrontierVille launched earlier in the month, now has 18.7 million users. And while Disney/Playdom's Gardens of Time gained over half a million users in the last 14 days, for a total audience of 17 million, the sim slipped from #5 to #8 to make way for The Sims Social and The Pioneer Trail. Words With Friends, another Zynga title which debuted on Facebook not too long ago, jumps to #8 with 10.8 million players, followed by Wooga's Diamond Dash with 10.4 million (up from 9.6 million) and Zynga's Cafe World with 10.3 million (around the same as two weeks ago). EA/PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz and Gaia's Monster Galaxy both dropped out of the top ten. 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.