It's Official: CityVille dethrones FarmVille as Zynga's top Facebook game

Alright, so it didn't exactly happen yesterday, but CityVille has soared high above FarmVille's 56.8 million players with a massive (for these days) 61.7 million monthly players. It did what many thought was the impossible in just 22 days, according to Inside Social, and it took good old FarmVille four months to reach that size back in the day. While we've already explored what might have contributed to the game's blindingly fast rise to Zynga supremacy, it's impossible to tell how long this will last.

It will take at least another month for CityVille's numbers to stabilize--or at least slow down, for Pete's sake. These numbers are purely an accumulation of the amount of players who have logged into the game at least once in the past three weeks. Whether the game can hold the interest of its nearly 62 million players for a lengthy period of time has yet to be seen. However, if the game keeps growing at this rate, it could easily meet FarmVille's former glory of 84 million monthly players by 2011. Until then, Mark Pincus and the CityVille team can enjoy their early Christmas gift Scrooge McDuck style.

Can CityVille meet and surpass FarmVille's all-time high of 84 million players? How long do you think CityVille will last as Zynga's top game?

Quote of the Moment: 'Zynga can't just throw FarmVille onto mobile'

Angry Birds Facebook

    You can't take an experience that works in one environment and one ecosystem and force-feed it onto another. It's like Zynga. They can't just take Farmville and throw it on mobile and see what sticks. The titles that have been successful for them on mobile are the ones they've built from the ground up for the platform.

Peter Vesterbacka of Rovio said this in an interview with Inside Social Games regarding Angry Birds' big move to Facebook. The (filthy rich) Angry Birds' "Mighty Eagle" also revealed that the Facebook version has been in the works for an entire year. This goes to show how seriously the company is taking the move in comparison to most studios who crank out Facebook games in a fraction of that time. However, the prime reason behind Rovio's extended development for Angry Birds Facebook is adapting the same experience to a different platform. One can imagine this is a challenge from either end of the spectrum.

[Image Credit: Game N Train]

What do you think of Rovio's strategic approach to Facebook? Will they be successful on the platform?