John Romero's Ravenwood Fair Has 10M Users, Expansion On The Way

LOLapps' Ravenwood Fair, a woodland sim designed by game industry veteran and id Software co-founder John Romero, who was a consultant on the game, now has over 10 million monthly active users. The Facebook game gained 1.2 million monthly players in December, bringing its total user base up 24 percent to 6.4 million. The title has continued to grow, gaining another 3.8 million users since then. As a result of the title's popularity, LOLapps is now scaling back on its other existing social games, and spending more time on Ravenwood Fair. VC-related site VentureBeat reports that an expansion is now in the works, titled Ravenstone Mine. Arjun Sethi, chief executive of San Francisco-based LOLapps, said "We are using a traditional strategy in games. Instead of focusing on how much money we can make from a user, we are focusing on how long we can hang on to that user." Ravenwood Fair was launched in October of last year, and developer LOLapps noted that players were spending money in the title at a much higher rate than the average for social games -- at just over 10 per cent, compared to the usual 3 to 5 percent. LOLapps was punished late last year by Facebook for passing on user information to marketing companies, which was a violation of Facebook's terms. Its games were temporarily removed from Facebook for a short while as a result.