Zynga's game, Farmville has been number one on Facebook, occasionally tripping off; for a while now, a new game from a European startup has overtaken Farmville in number of daily active users. According to independent analytics firm, AppData, King.com's prized game, Bubble Witch Saga has 6.5 million daily active users. That outranks Farmville stats, however, the stats still change by the hour. Furthermore, Farmville's monthly active users stats still outrank Bubble Witch Saga's. Farmville has nearly 26 million monthly active users, which is still the highest on the apps leaderboard. The fact that Bubble Witch Saga's numbers vary hourly and that while sometimes it is number one, other times it isn't demonstrates, how fickle social gaming is and how rankings don't really mean much in the short term.
Can the witches stay in their number one bubble?
Bubble Witch Saga is basically a game where there are three witches in a room and on the ceiling, there are a number of multiple coloured bubbles. The witches brew bubbles to match the ones on the ceiling and you basically have to shoot up the bubble to create a combination of three or more. Your score depends on how many combinations you make, how many cauldron bubbles you didn't use up and finally a set of cauldrons at the bottom with assigned scores that bubbles fall into (you receive scores based on which cauldron the bubbles fall into). The game integrates a social aspect in that there are multiple worlds that you need to travel through, matching bubbles along the way. You see your friends' scores (friends that are playing the game) along the way, as well as where they've reached on the map. The point of that is to encourage you to compete and play more.
The game itself is not a new concept. The bubble matching game has been around for a while, I myself played it on neopets.com ten years ago. What's new is the competition between your friends. And the graphics are cool. While it does not have the waiting time factor that Farmville does (you have to wait an allotted amount of time to harvest each crop and milk your cows), it does have a limited number of levels. Granted, these can always be updated, Angry Birds style. The real question is, how long will King.com manage to stay in the top spot. Remember how we talked about The Sims Social taking over Farmvilleand then sinking into oblivion? That is highly likely to be Bubble Witch Saga's fate as well. What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below.
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