CityVille surpasses FarmVille in popularity

There's a new king in town, as the newly-launched Zynga game rockets to 61.7 million monthly users

For the first time since its rapid rise to prominence in the summer of 2009, FarmVille is no longer the most popular application on the Facebook platform, according to AppData. CityVille, which launched less than a month ago, now has 61.7 million monthly users, just over FarmVille’s nearly 56.8 million.

CityVille is also the top gainer for the day, with 6.9 million monthly users added, and for the week, with 23.5 million added. The new social game from Zynga has wowed since its launch, when it picked up 290,000 players in under 24 hours. In under two weeks, the game had attracted six million daily active users and 22 million monthly actives.

The game lets Facebook users build up cities in rudimentary SimCity fashion, except with a massive social element.

As for developers with overall most users, Zynga is still the obvious leader, with nearly 262 million monthly users. Not even close behind are Takeoff Monkey (developer of favorite quotes app “Phrases) with 63.4 million and game developers Crowdstar and Electronic Arts (EA) with 48 million and 39 million, respectively. Besides Zynga, only ten other developers have greater than 20 million monthly users.

Zynga isn’t letting its popularity go to waste. Sales of virtual goods in CityVille are likely as successful as they are in any other of the company’s popular games.

The social gaming company made somewhere around $200 million in revenue in 2009, according to some estimates, with that number widely expected to either double or triple this year. Estimates of Zynga’s total revenue for 2010 have ranged from $500-700 million, Forbes reports.

They can’t all be winners though. AppData also ranks the “top losers” for the day and week, and Zynga’s wild west game FrontierVille made the former list, with 254,954 users dropping the application.