The Top 25 Facebook Games of December 2012

http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2012/12/03/the-top-25-facebook-games-of-december-2012/

Just in time for Inside Social Apps New York, it’s time to look at the Top 25 Facebook games of December. While not as busy as November, the past month saw a fair amount of activity with several titles seeing dramatic traffic and position changes.

For the third month in a row, Zynga’s FarmVille 2 is the No. 1 Facebook game both in terms of monthly active users (which measures the overall reach a game has on the social network) and daily active users (the best gauge of a title’s core audience).

Even though FarmVille 2 took the top spot on both lists, it also saw the biggest traffic loss over the past month, dropping by 15.1 million MAU to 49.2 million. Actually, Zynga had the most dramatic losses on the MAU list: The Ville had the second largest loss, down by 5.8 million; this isn’t exactly surprising, though, based on how the game’s traffic has been dropping like a rock since mid-August. After that, Zynga Slingo was down by 4.2 million MAU.

Zynga probably isn’t too broken up about the traffic losses, though, since CityVille 2 was by far the biggest gainer, up by 24.6 million MAU. After that, Ruby Blast Adventures (formerly known as Ruby Blast) snagged 10.3 million MAU. The third-highest gain went to King.com’s Candy Crush Saga, which brought in 3.4 million MAU.

FarmVille 2 also saw a loss in traffic in terms of DAU, though this time it wasn’t nearly as dramatic. The game only fell by 200,000 DAU, meaning it still has a total of 8.5 million. The biggest traffic drop for the month, though, went to FreshPlanet’s SongPop, which fell by 700,000 DAU. Following that, both Zynga’s CityVille and Bubble Safari were down by 600,000 DAU.

The largest gain, unsurprisingly, went to CityVille 2 with 3.79 million DAU. That said, King.com cleaned up this month between Pet Rescue Saga and Candy Crush Saga. Pet Rescue Saga —which launched in late October — is already up to 1.7 million DAU, a gain of 1.696 million. Candy Crush Saga, meanwhile, saw an increase of 1.6 million DAU to 6.4 million.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Come back next week for the beginning of December’s Top 25 gainers and losers, when we look at the continued performance of games that appeared on the top 25 DAU list.