CityVille Knocks Off FarmVille as Top Facebook App
Urban upstart CityVille has quickly zoomed past country cousin FarmVille as the most popular Facebook app, according to a company that tracks Facebook app activity.
As of Jan. 2, CityVille had 82.3 million monthly active users, according to Palo Alto, Calif.-based AppData. “Monthly active users” refers to the number of individuals who have interacted with the app during the past 30 days. That compares with nearly 58 million monthly active users for FarmVille, which had been the No. 1 app on Facebook and now ranks second.
Nearly 16.8 million users play CityVille on any given day, according to AppData, compared with 15.6 million for FarmVille.
San Francisco-based Zynga Inc. makes CityVille and FarmVille as well as FrontierVille and Texas HoldEm Poker, the No. 4 and No. 5 apps on Facebook in terms of monthly active users, respectively. The company introduced CityVille on Dec. 1, 2010.
As Zynga describes it, CityVille is a social game that allows users to build a dream city from the ground up. CityVille is available on Facebook in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
“CityVille is where Monopoly meets Main Street,” Sean Kelly, general manager of CityVille, said in November.
FarmVille lets users grow crops and raise animals on their own virtual farms.
What’s behind the success of CityVille and FarmVille?
“CityVille players frequently compare the game to crack … and CityVille appears to be taking a similarly addictive approach,” according to Geekosystem.com.
Not everybody is giddy about CityVille’s towering growth, however.
Writing on AOL’s Switched.com, Matthew Zuras said: “You jerks. We told you not to do it, but you went and signed up anyway. In fact, it seems like you ignored us with great gusto, because Zynga’s new money-pit ‘CityVille’ has just surpassed the number of users of its old money-pit, ‘FarmVille.’”
Zynga is far and away the top app developer for Facebook. Its games had nearly 282 million monthly active users as of Jan. 2, according to AppData.
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