Electronic Arts' Madden game hits Facebook

EA hopes to usurp Zynga's dominance as the leading social gamer

If Electronic Arts wants to usurp Zynga's dominance on Facebook, it may have to attract a whole new group of users with its flagship games.

By bringing its well-established Madden franchise onto the social network, EA is probably betting that it can do that. 

EA launched late Tuesday its Madden NFL Superstars game on Facebook. 

You may be wondering exactly how popular is the Madden franchise? How many potential new users are we talking about? While no one can be sure how many users will flock to the free Facebook version of the game we can look at the number of people willing to pay $50 for the privilege of playing its console based big brother online.

According to Peter Moore, president of EA SPORTS, in an EA press release Madden NFL 11, which launched in August of 2010, "Madden NFL 11 is the number one selling game in August, and the game has created enormous enthusiasm in the online community, Each day on consoles, fans are playing as many games online as the equivalent of 750 full NFL seasons." He then went on to add "Now on Facebook, Madden NFL Superstars will bring a whole new dimension and audience to the Madden NFL experience.”

Not to mention, that the title is likely to garner some added attention from the start of the NFL's season this fall. Last seasons Super Bowl XLIV became the most-watched TV show ever, attracting the attention of 153.4 million viewers.

The game is a product of a collaboration between EA Sports and EA’s Playfish, a social game division. In addition to releasing the Madden game and EA Sports FIFA Superstars, Playfish has also released titles like Pirates AHOY!, Pet Society™, Poker Rivals™, Who Has The Biggest Brain?™, and Gangster City™. In addition to play on Facebook, Playfish games are also distributed on other social networking platforms such as MySpace, bebo and cyworld.

This news happens to come at a statically poor time for Zynga, since they are in the wake of a copyright suit from Digital Chocolate over the much promoted Mafia Wars name. If they lose that case they could be forced to re-brand one of their signature games while contending with Maddens rising popularity. Then again some of the capital provided by Googles $100 million investment could be useful if they do need to make a rapid name change.

EA is currently the second-largest publisher of Facebook based games, by number of active monthly users. They have about 54.9 million people. Zynga, the raining champion of Facebook games has a whopping 227 million active users each month.

Can EA unseat Zynga as the new king of Facebook games? Only time will tell.

(Image source: Facebook.com/album)