Zynga's "Empires" nears 10M users in 10 days

Not as quickly growing as CityVille, but successful by any other standard

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Zynga’s latest release, Empires & Allies, is this week’s fastest growing game on the Facebook platform. Who would’ve guessed? Only 10 days from launch, the game has accumulated 9.7 million monthly active users and 6.9 million daily active users, according to AppData.

The game’s growth, while obviously great compared to other developers, doesn’t quite rival the astonishing explosion of excitment seen with Zynga’s last game launched on Facebook, CityVille. That game hit 22 million monthly users in less than two weeks; Empires & Allies is only halfway there in about the same period of time. Making things look even less bright is the fact that Empires & Allies launched in more countries than CityVille did, which was thought by many to be a clever strategy to pick up a lot of users quickly.

That said, it took CityVille about a month before it hit a real stride and overcame FarmVille as the most popular application on Facebook. Empires & Allies still has time to build its own empire.

I reached out to Zynga to get some official stats from the company, but they’re not releasing those yet.

Other fast-growing games on Facebook include Monster Galaxy (Gaia Online) with 14.7 million users (+17%), Army Attack (Digital Chocolate) with 2.6 million users (+208%) and PyramidVille (Kobojo) with 2.2 million users (+45%).

It’s a critical time for Zynga, which is reportedly preparing its initial public offering after a couple other successful social media IPOs. With Renren and LinkedIn happily out the gate and Facebook mulling an earlier-than-expected IPO with a $100 billion valuation, it’s a pretty nice time for social startups to start trading publicly.

To that end, Zynga needs to look like the best possible company right now, down to the fundamentals: that means keeping its user base enormous and always interested in the company’s new games.

Besides Empires & Allies, Zynga recently launched Hanging With Friends, a hangman-inspired game for the iPhone.