14 DAY TRIAL // Zynga's new CityVille game, released for Facebook, has broken popularity records for the social network, reaching a jaw-dropping 84.2 million active monthly users, overtaking another Zynga title, FarmVille.
Zynga revealed CityVille little over a month ago, but the title has already broken Facebook's old active monthly audience record, which was set at 83.8 million in March of last year by FarmVille.
CityVille reached even more people, largely due to three major factors, detailed by its developer.
First off, CityVille was Zynga's first multilingual release, having versions in English, but also in German, Italian, Spanish, and French, thus allowing more people an easier access to it.
Next up, Zynga thanks the players that promoted the title through word of mouth, but also through invites sent to their Facebook friends, which drew in more people that weren't aware the game was launched.
Last but not least, Zynga used all of its other Facebook games, from FarmVille to FrontierVille, Mafia Wars or Zynga Poker to advertise the release of CityVille, thus appealing to those that were already interested in gaming on Facebook.
Inside Social Games predicts that with the game's recent growth rate of 2 million new players every day, CityVille is set to cross the 100 million monthly users in the immediate future.
In case you want another huge number, CityVity's daily active user audience is currently at 14.8 million, more than the most popular full-pledged online game, World of Warcraft, which has "just" 12 million monthly subscribers.
CityVille is a free-to-play Facebook application, but relies on microtransactions in order to make people spend small sums of money on virtual assets.
The whole goal is to build and expand your own city, as seen in previous games like SimCity, by constructing buildings, parks or recreational areas, as well as taking care of your population.
Players can also establish franchises that you can set up in the cities of your Facebook friends.