As you can tell from the screen shot, your friends can help you manage the city as well. Though the interactivity is limited in some ways, CityVille does a good job of creating the illusion of real-time play, where lots of things are happening on the screen at the same time. In the game, you can build a town with homes, shops, farms and community buildings. Join gaming leaders live this October 25-26 in San Francisco to examine the next big opportunities within the gaming industry.ĬityVille passed FarmVille’s current monthly active user count of 58 million on Dec. The open questions are: What sort of social features will game makers devise next to enthrall users in new games this year? And when does the Facebook “growth effect” begin to plateau?
But CityVille had a second force behind it: With Facebook’s reach still growing quickly, namely in Asia, CityVille’s growth comes on the back of an larger Facebook - which arguably helps grow games even faster. True, CityVille is merely an evolution from Frontierville, another Zynga game which has similar features. It’s a sign that social interaction - something that CityVille has on steroids, by not only tapping your friends, but encouraging you to help friends build out their own cities too - is still seeing new forms of innovation online. Who would have thought that a simple city simulation would become the biggest-ever app on Facebook, eclipsing FarmVille? Zynga‘s CityVille game crossed 84.2 million monthly active users over the weekend, beating Zynga’s FarmVille, which peaked at 83.76 million users in March, 2010, according to market analyst AppData. We’re not far off a time when launching a big new social game (like CityVille) will involve spanning Facebook and mobile from the start.Interested in learning what's next for the gaming industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry this October at GamesBeat Summit Next. They’ll increasingly be looking to jump across to Facebook, for people who want to play on their computers as well as on their mobile devices.
They have millions of players between them, and are making enough money from in-app payments to dent the upper reaches of Apple’s Top Grossing Games chart, even though the initial download is free. There’s a new breed of popular social games on iPhone and iPad, including Smurfs’ Village, Tap Zoo, World War, Zombie Farm, We Rule, Bakery Story, Pocket Frogs, Trade Nations and many more. The best social games are a.) really addictive, and b.) reward regular play – meaning the ability to dip in while away from a computer is top of the request list from players. However, in 2011, every major social games publisher is thinking hard about iOS, probably Android, and maybe some of the other smartphones too.
The good news? You can bet an iOS version will be along sooner rather than later.įor the last two to three years, anyone talking about ‘social games’ has generally meant Facebook. Sadly, this isn’t yet translating into simultaneous launches for new games like CityVille, which for now is playable on Facebook alone. It seemed to herald a new age where the company would bring its biggest Facebook games to mobile devices, using Facebook Connect to make the games run across both platforms, letting you dip in from whatever device you wanted. More than 100 million players agree with me, too.īut here’s a question: why can’t you play it on your iPhone or iPad? Last year, Zynga launched FarmVille for iOS, and later hired a new executive purely to focus on mobile. Speaking as someone who never got FarmVille, I can say that CityVille is a lot more fun. CityVille is much better, and besides, Facebook took steps a while back to cut down on those annoying wall posts if you’re not playing the games in question.Īnyway, CityVille is great: a more cartoonish take on SimCity, except built around social aspects so your friends can not only visit your city (and vice versa), but can open up franchises of their shops, send you gifts and generally help you build a thriving metropolis. But if the very mention of that makes you start ranting about friends spamming you senseless with ‘lost cow’ messages, stop.
Have you played CityVille yet? As its name implies, it’s from the same company (Zynga) that made Facebook game FarmVille.