FARMVILLE! :D

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27593/GDC_Farmville_Reaches_32_Million_Daily_Users.php

As part of a technical talk at GDC’s Social Games Summit, Amitt Mahajan, lead developer of Farmville, revealed a number of interesting statistics about the game, including current stats of 32 million players per day.

Farmville, a Harvest Moon-like farming social game, is one of Facebook’s biggest success stories, earning the small team huge accolades before being purchased by Zynga.

The game took only 5 weeks from conception to launch, developing the back end, using off-the-shelf components when possible, but more than that using best practices from both the web and game development worlds to keep the game extremely portable. Multiple times during development, or even after, Facebook’s API or rules changed, and with a strong web development sensibility at the beginning, nothing slowed the team down significantly. This also helped them avoid user fatigue due to lag or errors.

The core team was six web developers, two artists and three designers. After launch, they wound up getting 18,000 users in the first 24 hours. At the end of four days, they had 1 million users per day, all without having ever promoted it.

Now, the game has more than 110 million installs, and they recently breached the 32 million daily user mark, though the “official” number is still 31 million, and as Mahajan says, that number is still growing.

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Amazing!

My girlfriend plays this game. When she goes on it for a few minutes is when I decide to do something more interesting like take a nap.

maybe based on userbase but what about profit?

I knew Iwata would say that... Pfff!

Its microtransactions if im not mistaken? Still.. a dev team of sub 10 people with a active userbase of 32m and "sold" to 110m users. Thats a success in my book no matter what.

In monetary terms WoW is proably a lot more sucessfull. Given the tiny dev team and huge userbase of this game though, it's a gigantic acheivement.

Even if the game is awful.

This tells me that there is still an untapped user base for the console makers to try and snag.

Well, with about 80M MAU and ARPU of ~30c/month for typical Facebook game simple calculation gives us $288M in yearly revenue. Since costs close to zero it's all profit. Not earth-shattering, but very good indeed, afaik all Facebook games generated about $500M in revenue last year. So Farmville is responsible for half of these money, megahit by Facebook standards.

casual gamers