On June 9th, social gaming powerhouse Zynga launched its latest creation: FrontierVille. The game takes many of the gameplay elements found in Zynga’s smash hit Farmville and adds some of adventure and spontaneity (not to mention a Wild West theme) to help spice things up. Today, less than two weeks after launch, the company says that it has 5.2 million daily active users.
To give some context to that stat, it was only eight days ago that Zynga CEO Mark Pincus announced that the game had over 1 million DAUs. Zynga’s Farmville (which just had its one year anniversary) has around 18 million daily active users according to Inside Network’s AppData leaderboard. Treasure Isle, another popular Zynga game, has 5.18 million DAUs.
So why does this matter? Zynga’s Facebook games saw staggering growth last year, but this year its games’ popularity has leveled off (and in some cases, dipped). It’s imperative for Zynga’s future success that it can keep launching hits. At this point FrontierVille has a long way to go before it can match Farmville, but it’s off to a solid start. Still, my hunch is that Zynga will have to start launching games that are innovative — as opposed to iterative, like FrontierVille — before we see another game succeed on the same scale as Farmville did at its peak.
Some other interesting stats about the game so far:
- 10 Million people have created homesteads
- Half a million people have had their avatars get “married”
- 5 million settlers have visited friends and have completed 550 million tasks
- 2.5 million settlers have ‘hired’ a friend
- 6.5 million players have chased away 141 million snakes
- 3 million players have scared the bear (87 million bears have been scared away)
