CityVille is Facebook record-breaker: biggest ever

Hang up your straw hat: city planning is the new farming. Or it is on Facebook, anyway.

Launched just a couple of months ago, Facebook smash CityVille is not just the biggest game on the social networking platform, it's the biggest Facebook game ever.

CityVille averaged over 84 million monthly users this past weekend, which means it's bigger than previous record-holder and Zynga stablemate FarmVille ever was: the latter's high-water mark was 83.76 million users, a number it recorded last March.

Though the games are superficially similar, sharing a common crop-tending mechanic, CityVille's fields and barns are a literal and figurative background to its central theme: building a bustling city full of residents, businesses, and civic structures. It's a faster-paced game than FarmVille, and, if anything, it's even more aggressive in encouraging players to build in-game connections with real-life friends -- a factor that's bound to be helping its meteoric rise.

And boom town CityVille is looking set to grow even bigger. It continues to post gains of about two million players per day, according to blog InsideSocialGames, and fueled by the burgeoning popularity of Facebook in the U.S. and overseas the game could eventually top 125 million monthly players.

CityVille's success is good news for the game's developer, Zynga, which had been seeing a downturn in its total userbase over the latter part of last year. Almost all Zynga's Facebook titles have posted gains over the last month, including FarmVille, though at less than 60 million monthly players, it's a mere shadow of its former self.

Perhaps most impressively of all, the seven most-played games on Facebook are currently all Zynga games.

info Yahoo