United Gamer Online (UGO)

by Mike Smith
Social gaming had been one of the biggest growth areas in video games, but the category has recently fallen on hard times. Numerous top Facebook games have taken a steep dive in popularity over the last few months.

It's not just the everyday ebb and flow of users between games, either. According to numbers from Inside Social Games, 23 of the 25 biggest Facebook games lost monthly average users in June, some by as much as 20%.
For many games, it's the second month of decline, and although many are gaining ground in daily average users -- indicating the players that remain are increasingly engaged with their games -- the news is sure to have furrowed brows in social game development boardrooms around the world.

Industry observers point to Facebook itself for the declining numbers, specifically to a change the company made in March around social game notifications. Players are no longer hit with constant updates on every tiny happening in these games, a move Facebook described at the time as an effort to make interactions "more streamlined, clear, and less spammy for users."

Most games quickly switched to email notifications, but not all their players have necessarily switched with them. The changes are bound to have reduced the visibility of Facebook games to many players.

But don't expect the games to be going away. At this week's unveiling of Apple's newest iPhone, Zynga -- which owns several of the affected games -- took the wraps off its latest version of Farmville, which will run on the iPhone. Like many news and IM iPhone programs, Farmville will use the phone's push notification system to keep iPhone farmers updated on their farm's development.
Zynga's also rolling out its newest game, Wild West-themed Frontierville, this week. Designed by Brian Reynolds, who gamers will remember for his work on strategy classics like Civilization II, it's been dubbed "Oregon Trail meets Little House on the Prairie meets FarmVille." It's Reynolds' first social game, and a deliberate attempt to reach a more diverse audience than existing social games have achieved. He's hoping as many as five million Facebookers will try the game this week alone.

The surprise decline has largely spared the abundance of smaller Facebook games, many of which continue to post significant gains in daily users. Notable climbers include Zynga's Mafia Wars -- one of the original breakout social networking hits -- and new titles like EA Sports' FIFA Superstars, released to coincide with the coming World Cup.