CityVille, Zynga’s latest hit game which surpassed FarmVille in size back in December, has been on a tear lately, surpassing 100 million monthly active users as of yesterday. The milestone is something that no other application has ever reached. And while growth might eventually slow down, the game appears to have plenty of space left to grow.
While Facebook may have surpassed 600 million users, many people are constantly wondering how big of a market games on the site actually is. While the social network has always thrown around numbers about the number of people installing applications, it’s pretty difficult to get a firm grasp on the exact number as the company is relatively quiet about it. Instead the site publishes things like “people install 20 million applications every day,” which ultimately provides little insight.
While Facebook may have surpassed 600 million users, many people are constantly wondering how big of a market games on the site actually is. While the social network has always thrown around numbers about the number of people installing applications, it’s pretty difficult to get a firm grasp on the exact number as the company is relatively quiet about it. Instead the site publishes things like “people install 20 million applications every day,” which ultimately provides little insight.
With CityVille approaching 20 million daily active users, we’d guess that there are probably 100 million people who interact with applications on a daily basis, and a fraction of that who are extremely active application users. Since Facebook has somewhere between 250 and 300 million daily active users, that means around a third of members are probably interacting with applications, and a smaller percentage are regulars of the app. If there’s anybody who can give accurate estimates on application usage, Zynga is probably the best suited to do so.
With more than 57 million daily active users across their games, Zynga is in a league of its own. The next largest application developer, Electronic Arts, has a little more than one tenth of the daily usage that Zynga does. The dramatic landscape highlights how skewed the application platform has become. Once a close race for the top position, there is now nobody that can compete with Zynga’s dominance. CityVille is a testament to how big the company has become. At this point, if you happen to be an active Facebook gamer, there’s a pretty good chance that CityVille has become one of the games you play on a daily basis.
The only question left is how large CityVille can become!
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