Zynga floated its shares at the end of last week. But it is a bit strange not to rank a game as more popular if more people are playing it. 'Clearly one measure of how popular a game is is how many people are recommending it to their friends.

'You have to see it in the wider context of Facebook trying to push the viral marketing benefits of partnering with the site rather than trying to snub Zynga,' Ian Maude, head of internet at Enders Analysis, told the BBC.

'Because of the inclusion of highest recommendations as a factor in determining this top 10, that would necessarily disadvantage some of the older games where the volume of recommendations may have been at its peak in the first three or four months, and so it's not entirely surprising that many of the most popular games of this year are new,' he said.Įxperts said that Facebook would have been unlikely to have deliberately handicapped Zynga's prospects, and more likely acted to promote its own analytics tools that track personal recommendations and sharing. Nick Gibson, an analyst at the consultants Games Investor, said Facebook's measurement system might have made it hard for the two-and-a-half-year-old title to compete. Farmville did not appear in Facebook's top 10 list. Notably it ranked Farmville as the third most played game with 32.1 million monthly active users. Appdata said Gardens of Time was the 14th most played title.Ī direct comparison suggested that Cityville had 48.8 million monthly active users compared to 8.5 million for Gardens of Time. The most up-to-date measurements of monthly active users based on Facebook's statistics and reported by the independent metrics firm Appdata suggested that Zynga's games Cityville, Castleville, Farmville and Texas Holdem were the four most played games on Facebook. 'The result is a list of the games that received the most user recommendations in 2011.' 'This list was compiled by looking at the top games on Facebook with more than 100,000 monthly active users and giving priority to those games with the highest user satisfaction scores,' it said.

After Techcrunch questioned the methodology, Facebook amended its company blog to explain its decision.

Cityville game on facebook