Within several months of growth, some of Facebook’s social games are showing seasonal decline in terms of the Daily Active Users (DAU). From 97 million users in November, the number of users decreased to 85.5 million as of December 21. One possible reason for the decline may be the December 9th Facebook platform issue that affected all applications for 48 hours. Another probable cause is that, since it is the holiday season, more people opted to concentrate on holiday activities like shopping rather than playing on-line games. Also, some of these games revised their structure hence affecting the game. An example would be Mafia Wars which added an anti-hacking tool to their system. On a positive note, Pet Society introduced a lottery feature in the game which helped increased their DAU.
Below is the table showing the decline of each game:
| Game | Dec High DAU | Dec 21 DAU | % Decline |
| Farmville | 28,168,448 | 26,240,616 | -7% |
| Café World | 10,714,586 | 9,079,596 | -15% |
| Happy Aquarium | 8,169,204 | 7,070,370 | -13% |
| FishVille | 7,459,387 | 6,644,904 | -11% |
| Mafia Wars | 7,021,764 | 5,574,330 | -21% |
| Zynga Poker | 5,013,652 | 4,773,945 | -5% |
| Pet Society | 5,094,052 | 4,753,688 | -7% |
| Restaurant City | 4,680,805 | 4,113,377 | -12% |
| YoVille | 3,463,083 | 2,833,933 | -18% |
| Farm Town | 5,374,337 | 4,110,261 | -24% |
As shown in the chart above, all the games showed considerable decline on the number of active users per day. The question is will we see improvements next year or a huge decline now that Facebook is currently upgrading its gaming platform with the launch of Game Dashboard on January 2010? Everybody’s eager to see the developments and hopefully it will be for the best.
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