Zynga's
CityVille, the
most popular app on Facebook ever, has drawn in more than 100 million monthly active users since launching on the social network six weeks ago,
according to Inside Social Games.
The social game owes much of its success to being the company's first internationally launched game, debuting with English, German, Italian, Spanish and French versions. Demographic data shows that over half of its record userbase is located outside of North America.
Zynga has also supported
CityVille's rapid growth by cross-promoting it through ads displayed in its other popular titles (e.g.
Mafia Wars, FrontierVille), and it claims players are helping push the game to their friends through invites and status updates, too.
FarmVille, previously Facebook's most popular app and also developed by Zynga, hit its peak of 84 million monthly users in March 2010 before the site enacted changes designed to limit "notification spam" from applications. The farming sim's audience has since shrunk to 57 million.
Though
CityVille is close to doubling
FarmVille's monthly user count, Inside Social Games notes that the city-building clone has 18.6 million daily players, indicating a "stickiness" (daily audience divided by monthly) of just 19 percent versus
FarmVille's current 26 percent.
Taking this into account along with
CityVille's average monthly active user growth recently slowing from three million new users per day to one million per day, Inside Social Games predicts that the game will not reach 110 million monthly players.
