Games are serious business on the social network Facebook. The competition for holding the top-most spots among the network’s users has put game publishing companies Electronic Arts and Zynga in rival positions. According to AppData, a site that tracks Facebook’s apps, EA’s newest social game, The Sims Social has surpassed Zynga’s Farmville and now has 36 million monthly active users.
Apart from this, The Sims Social has held the top spot as the fastest growing app on Facebook for more than a week. On Sunday, it picked up more than 1.7 million new users taking the weekly new users to 9.3 million. These statistics has given the EA game, a fourth position on Facebook, behind Zynga’s own Empire & Allies, Cityville and Texas HoldEM Poker. Zynga’s Farmville now has 35.7 million active monthly users.
Zynga launched Farmville in 2009 and the game zoomed to the top of the charts as hundreds of millions of players rushed to plow virtual fields on FarmVille. At its peak, nearly 32.5 people played the gamein a single day, according to AppData.
But since then FarmVille has ebbed in popularity as players moved on to other titles, many of them published by Zynga, itself.
The Sims Social game has elevated Electronic Arts as the second top Facebook app developer with 77.8 million monthly active users, which is considerably behind Zynga’s 273 million monthly active users. Yet, when we consider that in third place social game maker Wooga has only 40 million monthly active users, we realize the space which EA has covered. Before the launch of The Sims Social, EA had only 29 million monthly active users.
EA seems poised to give Zynga a run for its money. EA has sold more than 140 million copies of The Sims and its sequels and expansion packs and has earned approximately $ 3 billion in revenue. The social-interaction-simulator-within-a-social-interaction-simulator, The Sims Social has scored with casual gamers because it is a very light game, that is easy to get into but with a lot of depth. The game involves controlling a ‘sim’ as it lives and trying to achieve lifetime goals and allows gamers to accomplish whatever they want to do. The Sims Social is known for tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp writing.
The competition between Zynga and EA is fierce and Zynga has been recruiting senior EA executives. Many of Zynga’s key employees, including its chief operating office John Schappert, its president of studios Steven Chiang, Farmville producer Mark Skaggs and executive producer of Zynga’s Empires & Allies, Amer Ajami came from EA.
In turn, EA has been aggressively expanding its social games business. In 2009, it acquired social game developer Playfish for $400-million. In July of this year it bought PopCap Games for $ 750 million. PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz , with 3 million players, was the 15th most popular game on Facebook in the last 24 hours.
EA spokesman John Reseberg said, “With PopCap and The Sims Social , we are now far and away the No. 2 player in social games, and, growing.”
Zynga, a San-Francisco, based company had plans to offer its shares to the public, however, the current economic turmoil has forced it to hold up its IPO, temporarily.