我们每天都能在appdata上，看到有某些游戏活跃用户出现了下滑。但是我们很少能看到zynga旗下的游戏farmville出现在下滑的榜单上。

punch-farmville

farmville高峰期甚至达到了8300万活跃用户，但是在4月份仅仅一个月时间内，farmville出现了致命性的下滑，流失440万活跃用户。目前的活跃用户数已经低于7800万，成为近一段时间以来的新低。

farmville

我们知道zynga的新游戏珍宝岛Treasure Isle势不可挡，仅仅上线一个月有余就俘获了超过2600万用户的心。对比珍宝岛，farmville的用户出现了游戏疲劳。从appdata提供的表格来看，farmville一直呈现了下滑的疲态。这一现象和中国开心农场或者其他形式的农场一样，从一开始的火爆渐渐会转入一个平稳期，从而开始被用户屏弃。

珍宝岛

这意味着说，曾经的farmville用户已经不再关注任何关于farmville应用更新进展的情况了。但是zynga的首席执行官马克-品克斯在接受商业周刊的访问时依然坚信，这样的用户流失对于zynga的营收影响只是暂时的。

其实对于用户来讲，社交游戏的某一类型已经不再是恒定的，不再是一招走江湖，势必创意迭出才是吸引用户持续关注的关键因素。

Despite the ever-growing buzz around the farm-themed Facebook game FarmVille, the game hit a slump last month, dropping from 82 million players in March to 78 million at the end of April.

Inside Social Games, which reported the numbers, attributes this loss to the removal of third-party notifications on Facebook, which mean players stopped receiving a constant flow on what’s happening in game. This reasoning seems pretty solid ( Zynga CEO Mark Pincus agrees, telling Business Week that it’s only affecting their business in ‘the short term’), especially considering that 14 games in the top 25 took a hit last month. That list of games includes Cafe World, Mafia Wars (both from FarmVille creator Zynga), Happy Aquarium from Crowdstar (which was already in decline the previous month), along with Pet Society and Restaurant City from Playfish.

We expect the drop may continue over the next month or so, especially with Facebook’s plans to eliminate gift requests from the network, which means that all of the gift giving and receiving will be confined within the game.

It’s also hard not to wonder how much of those declining numbers are also a sign of game fatigue, particularly as new games, i.e. Zynga’s Treasure Isle, Playfish’s Hotel City and Playdom’s Social City rocketed into the top 20 games of the month. Serious social gamers have also been actively complaining about bug-riddled games for months, and scores more were teed off last week, after they were required to hand over their email to continue playing FarmVille, Mafia Wars, et al. In a Games.com poll of roughly 500 readers, 61% of the respondents said they would rather quit playing than give up their email. How much of a hold do these games have over its followers if something as simple as giving up an email makes them want to call it quits?

As Facebook continues to lay the smack down on social games that rely on its network to survive, it’ll be interesting to see how many of the social gaming companies will be around in the next two years and what big wigs like Zynga and Playfish will do to make sure players keep coming back to spend their real-life cash on virtual goods.

越多更多可以访问games.com或者inside social game