The game is now more popular than Twitter

Feb 22, 2010 10:02 GMT  ·  By

Ask any gamer what's the most popular game of all time and one answer you're not likely to get is Farmville. But, like it or not, Zynga's Farmville, which has been clogging our Facebook news feeds for months now, is by far the game played by the most people in history with the sole exception of, perhaps, the 25-year-old Tetris. The social game that took Facebook and bored housewives worldwide by storm is now being played by 80 million people every month and almost 30 million every day.

As of now, more people play Farmville every month than use Twitter. OK, so nobody really knows how many people use Twitter except for Twitter and there were 75 million visitors to the Twitter domain in January, so maybe it's a bit of a stretch to say Farmville is bigger than the microblogging service but, still, even the fact that it's comparable says a lot.

The game has been a runaway success in a market filled with runaway successes. In the months since its release, it was launched in June last year, it has been gaining new farmers, make that, users at a brisk pace, which actually seems to be picking up. For the past few months, it has been adding 10 million new users every two months, according to data gathered by All Facebook.

Perhaps even more telling is the level of engagement as about 30 million people check into Farmville every day, from the 200 million who log into Facebook daily. Weekly, active users are above 50 million and the number is growing fast.

Even more mind-blowing stats, on Valentine's Day, Farmville users sent out 220 million virtual gifts in less than one day. Apparently, there's something about farm animals that just makes everyone want to share their love. And spread their love too, apparently, as the numbers don't really add up, a lot of people definitely sent more than just one gift. Don't put all your eggs in one basket seems to apply rather well to country life-themed games. One thing's for sure, even the most recent valuations putting Zynga at $1 billion may be a bit conservative.