Farmville Loses 4.4 Million Players in a Month

FarmVille is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social-networking website Facebook. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops and trees, and raising livestock.

Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 82.4 million active users and over 23.9 million Facebook application fans in May 2010.The total number of FarmVille users alone are over 20% of the users of Facebook and over 1% of the population of the world. Despite this, Farmville is still classed by Zynga as being in Beta testing stage.

But now the game has started losing its players.

Despite becoming a household name in the social gaming world, “FarmVille” has recently lost some momentum. The game hit a slump last month as it dropped from 82 million players in March to 78 million at the end of April.

Inside Social Games reported the numbers, and suggests the loss is due to the removal of third party notifications on Facebook, a tool that stopped players receiving a constant flow of information about the farmyard shenanigans. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has suggested this drop in numbers is only for the “short term”, as “FarmVille” wasn’t the only game from the company to lose some followers.

The list of games affected includes other Zynga titles “Cafe World” and “Mafia Wars”, as well as games from Crowdstar and Playfish. It’s expected that the drop may continue over the next month, as gift requests are eliminated from Facebook and can only take place in the game itself.

Hope these games attain their position again in top Facebook Games.