Most played games on facebook

The Christmas traffic decline has melted away, and a number of games saw significant growth in February ?more so than January, anyway. However, for each significant gain, there were some loses as well, as roughly one-third of the list dropped in monthly active users, and a few of those drops are highly popular titles such as FishVille and Happy Aquarium.

On the lighter side of things, Zynga抯 FarmVille continues to hold on to top honors with new records in monthly users once again, while competitor CrowdStar attempts to increase its popularity even further. Also, RockYou makes its move back to its former glory from the early days of Facebook with heavily increased MAUs for both Birthday Cards and Zoo World. Another game, Hero World, also made its jocuri online debut this month.

February was a potentially big month for games, because Facebook introduced a home page redesign at the beginning of the month that moved applications from a bottom toolbar into the left-hand navigation column, and moved notifications from the toolbar to the top navigation bar. Facebook also added what it calls a Games Dashboard ?basically, a home page filter that lets users see a page of the Facebook games they and their friends have been playing. So far, the impact does not look to be negative for social games overall. The full impact of the redesign will only be felt this month, though, as Facebook is removing application notifications from the new notifications bar.

Here are the highlights for the top 25 Facebook Games for July, 2011:

Zynga憇 FarmVille shatters its old records once again, gaining over 7.5 million new monthly active users, bringing the game抯 total monthly players up to a whopping 83,004,461.
At a distant second comes RockYou憇 Birthday Cards with just over 47 million MAUs, having gained over 7 million new users as well ?this gift-giving app isn抰 really a game, although it contains a virtual currency. Rather, it has included a window for RockYou抯 game Zoo World (more on that in a moment).
Surprisingly, the virtual aquarium games did not do too well through February as Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar lost over 1.5 million users, with Texas Hold扙m Poker moving past it to #4. Zynga抯 FishVille also dropped from #5 to #7 with roughly a 850,000 MAU loss. Furthermore, Fish World, from Tall Tree Games, has completely fallen off the charts.
Though aquariums aren抰 doing too well, zoo keeping seems to be growing as RockYou抯 Zoo World gains an impressive 4.1 million monthly active users, showing that simple mechanics and cute animals ?and however else the app is growing ?can go quite far. It comes in at #8, up from #10.
After a long game of cat and mouse, Playfish憇 Pet Society finally loses out to PetVille by a difference of less than 300,000 users. They come in at #10 and #9 respectively.
While CrowdStar抯 long popular fish game dropped, the cold winter nights have proven lucrative for its tropical Happy Island app, as this warming title moves up from #17 to #14 with almost a 2 million MAU gain. Unfortunately, Happy Pets still staggered slightly, losing 566,909 users, and dropping one ranking, to #17.
In regards to tropical games, Island Paradise, from Meteor Games also sees minor growth, moving up one rank to #19, with just over 7.6 million monthly active users, and just behind it comes RockYou抯 Hero World. The super hero RPG earns 7,033,749 MAUs for the month of February.
Little farming app (Lil) Farm Life reappears on the list, coming in with about 5.9 million MAUs and landing at #22.
Lastly, the boom that was Shikha抯 Pillow Fight seems to have died out, as the app has lost more than 8.4 million users, dropping from #14 to #25.