With the incredible growth of Farmville over the last few months, I have been curious to see at which point it would overtake Twitter in terms of popularity. According to Facebook, Farmville is now bigger than Twitter. Let that sink in for a minute, more people play Farmville than use Twitter. Twitter has been around for a couple years now and Farmville has only been around for 4 or 5 months, maybe less. To become bigger than one of the biggest internet phenomenons in only a few months is an unreal achievement. According to the latest numbers from Appdata, Farmville is going to hit over 70 million players in a matter of days.
Also of note, Facebook itself now has over 350 million users worldwide. That is more people using Facebook than there are citizens in the USA. Again, these numbers are just plain staggering. As always, I can’t help but be incredibly impressed at both the Facebook platform for games and Zynga’s ability to execute so well. I can only imagine how big Farmville will get with Farmville.com now open.
According to Techcrunch, Zynga is planning on making Farmville playable outside of Facebook at Farmville.com via the Facebook Connect program. This should be fantastic news for people who have Facebook blocked at work or school and still want to be able to enjoy some quality time with their farm.
Of course, Zynga has opted to use the Facebook Connect program largely due to the fact that they are still building solely on the Facebook platform and for good reason. Facebook enabled Farmville to grow to over 65 million players. That is six times larger than World of Warcraft.
You will still need to have a Facebook account to play Farmville, so that much hasn’t changed. It should still more or less be the same experience so if you like Farmville, this just means you have one more place to play.
Also, if you haven’t been to Farmville.com, it no longer redirects to the Zynga.com website. It’s actually a pretty nice looking game portal.
It seems like it wasn’t too long ago that Farmville hit 50 million users, but hey times changes real fast in Facebookland and so the growth keeps rolling on for Zynga’s smash hit Farmville. To continue with the tradition of unparalleled growth, according to Appdata, Farmville has crossed the 60 million user mark.
What is really quite something about this news is that while game after game has petered out, Farmville just keeps growing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it hits 100 million and we start hearing about it breaking some kind of Guiness book world record.
One thing you might have wondered is why do you have to be a Facebook user to play Farmville. I’m sure there are a lot of different reasons, but there are two big, extremely obvious reasons why Zynga chose to build Farmville on Facebook instead of building it on Myspace or even just hosting the game on their own website. The reasons are that Facebook is huge (300 million users) and incredibly social. Those two reasons actually build off of each other to make Farmville the most played game in the world right now. Read more…
At the end of September 2009, Farmville, broke a record that is down right astonishing for a Facebook game – it has been played by more than 50 million people. Let that sink in dear farmer. There are more than 50 million people playing Farmville in the world. That’s a small country’s worth of pepople pretending to be farmers in their spare time.
To compare this to any other game at this point is absurd. Really and truly, I’ve never even heard of a game being as popular as Farmville. Not only is it popular, but it’s what can only be described as a cultural phenomenon. Read more…