CastleVille is the Second Most Played Facebook Game Daily in 22 Days

If there's one takeaway from this, it's that 'Ville games still got it. Zynga's CastleVille has surpassed the likes of FarmVille, The Sims Social and Zynga Poker to become the second most played game daily on Facebook with 8.1 million returning every day. The game is now in the top five for monthly players, with 27.6 million, according to AppData. And it did it in just 22 days.

As a result, CastleVille is both faster and slower than CityVille was a year. The latter reached nearly as many monthly players in almost half the time, but didn't amass as many daily players as Zynga Dallas's new hotness did last month. For what it's worth, CastleVille is far stronger out of the gate where it counts: daily players, the best measure of how gripping a Facebook game is.

This explosive growth can be chalked up to a few factors, but one stands out the most: the Zynga fan base. CastleVille released to a pool of over 200 million able-handed social gamers practically twitching at the thought of a new game to play. Of course, Zynga took great advantage of this, employing several cross promotions across its existing stable of successful games. "Reach Level 5 in CastleVille and get a free Cow" ... or something like that.

That easily explains the burst of growth, but what is it about CastleVille that's drawing more players in than nearly all of Zynga's games? While the game is certainly the most robust, full-featured and gorgeous 'Ville game to date, it's still a 'Ville game. Could it simply be that it's new and shinier than the rest, or is the 'Ville formula really still the best way to approach social games?

Source: Games

Zynga’s CastleVille Crosses 5M Daily Active Users, Now Growing Faster Than CityVille

Zynga’s newest Facebook game, CastleVille, has crossed five million daily active users. To put this in perspective, the social gaming giant’s fastest growing (and most popular) game CityVille, only reached 3.2 million daily active users six days after its launch.

The newest title from the social gaming giant allows players to build mini-empires from castles, craft art and armour and trade, and defend your kingdom in a medieval world. The game was created by the Zynga Dallas team, which was part of the social gaming giant’s acquisition of Bonfire Studios.

With this new game, Zynga took key elements of each ‘Ville’ title and brought the best into CastleVille. CastleVille combines with elements of self-expression from FarmVille, the ability to build the fantasy city of your dreams with CityVille, and the rich narrative and storytelling features from FrontierVille.

The game is also experimenting with new ways of being social, and self-expression. The basis of the game is around building the castle of your dreams and transforming the unexplored land into your very own kingdom. Along the way, you’ll encounter a number of characters, who are all involved in the storyline of the game; and can complete quests.

For background, FrontierVille has 2.6 million daily active users six days after launch. Currently CityVille and FarmVille are seeing 11 million and 7 million daily active users, respectively according to AppData. And 68 percent of CastleVille players are already playing at least twice a day. So far, 135,176,035 quests have been completed, there have been 4,594,750 expansions into the Gloom; 23,845,983 beasties have been banished from the kingdom, 182,360 Bubbly Grogs have been crafted and 8,262,768 baby cows were raised.

Other recently launched games Adventure World and Empires & Allies don’t seem to have grown quite as fast as CastleVille. And CastleVille’s early success could be good news for the gaming company’s top line. Hits are a big revenue-maker for Zynga, who reported that profits were down in Q2 of this year because of the lack of any new game launches in the first half of 2011. In the third quarter, Zynga’s revenue was up by 80 percent but net income dropped.

Of course, it should be interesting to see if CastleVille can sustain the same growth that CityVille did over the next few months. Stay tuned.



Source: TechCrunch