How Zynga's CityVille Drew 70 Million Players In Less Than a Month

An article at Gamasutra takes an in-depth look at how Zynga's new browser-based social game CityVille managed to accumulate tens of millions of players in the relatively short time since its launch early this month. Quoting: "The Facebook interface induces a high degree of user blindness. It does not do a great job of exposing new games and applications, and lacks a directory or a 'Featured in the App Store' style of editorial (as Apple does for the iPhone), which means that for most developers there are huge problems in getting their games in front of users' eyeballs. With all of the free advertising channels on the platform now constrained or dead, this has meant that the Facebook economy has been acquiring an increasingly Darwinian shape. Where it used to be an egalitarian environment in which any developer could strike it big, over the last year it has become top-heavy with larger developers accruing exponential success, and cutting off oxygen to smaller companies by default."

Re:Cross Promoting

[Machtyn]

Or another example. My wife plays FrontierVille and FarmVille. In order to complete a barn or basket or something, she had to collect 6 different objects. The final object was only obtainable by starting a CityVille account.

Surprisingly, she said, "enough, I can only handle two time waster games," and didn't sign up.