14 DAY TRIAL // CityVille, Zynga's latest social gaming sensation is breaking record after record and is already the most popular Facebook app of all time. The game is now close to passing another milestone, becoming the first Facebook app to have over 100 million monthly active users. In fact, it may have already passed that since the stats both AppData and Facebook itself provide are not in real time.
CityVille has had a great run so far, the game overpassed FarmVille, Zynga's biggest hit to date, by the end of 2010 and it has kept on growing since.
About a week ago, CityVille took the title of most popular Facebook app of all time, with over 84 million users and didn't slow down then either, it is now close to 100 million and should be hitting the milestone very, very soon.
With well over 600 million people on Facebook and over 300 million all time players to lure in, CityVille has a lot of space to grow yet. What's interesting is not necessarily the fact that it grew so fast and so much, but that it went beyond what any Zynga game has done before, clearly attracting users who may have never played one of its games or any game on Facebook ever.
CityVille was launched in early December 2010. In a week, it had 6 million users, already making waves as one of the fastest growing apps in Facebook history.
Before the end of the year, it overtook FarmVille to become the most popular app of the moment. After that, it continued to add new users at pretty much the same rate as before.
However, comparing it to FarmVille, Zynga's previous monster hit, is not really fair. When FarmVille was launched, Facebook was considerably smaller. While the game may not have gotten as many users as CityVille is getting now, it actually grew more in terms of percentage of Facebook users playing it.
At the height of its success, 20 percent of Facebook users played FarmVille, which would mean CityVille will have to get at least 125 million and probably closer to 150 million to equal it. But with 100 million players already, that doesn't look like much of a challenge anymore.