Frontierville tops Facebook's weekly gainers with 5.4 million new users

With players recently flocking away from Zynga's Farmville by the millions, some wondered if the top social gaming company had lost a little bit of its luster. Well, if the early success of Farmville successor Frontierville is any indication, that luster is still plenty shiny, thanks very much.

According to AppData (via InsideSocialGames), Frontierville has gaining an incredible 5.4 million monthly users over the last week, a 656% increase from the partial-week launch of the five days previous. Most of the gains came between between June 17 and 19 when Frontierville's users shot up from about 1.5 million to over 6 million, possibly due to a recent change in the way Facebook reports active users.

Among other notable gainers, EA Sports/Playfish's FIFA Superstars continues to capitalize on World Cup fever worldwide (though possibly not as much as EA would have liked) with over 600,000 new users, a 52% jump. And somewhat long-in-the-tooth game School of Wizardry saw a surprising jump this week, gaining over 500,000 users after weeks of anemic growth (we suspect the aforementioned Facebook data reporting change).

Can other games mimic FIFA Superstars' World Cup success?

As mentioned in our discussion of the week's top gaining Facebook games, EA Sports/Playfish's FIFA Superstars has seen some relatively healthy growth since launching just a few weeks ago. No doubt the FIFA branding (and the support of a major company like EA) has helped the game stand out from the crowd. But there may be an external reason for the game's recent success -- the World Cup.

As VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi recently noticed, the game has logged over 3.3 million World Cup match predictions since launching near the start of the tournament. The predictions have ranged from prescient (97% picked Brazil over North Korea) to horribly wrong (only 1.6% picked Switzerland beating Spain) but these guesses are notable more for their volume than their predictive ability. For possibly the first time, a real world sporting event is driving interest in a virtual social game, thanks in part to clever integration from the developers.

If FIFA Superstars' success continues throughout the tournament, we can probably expect other developers to try to capitalize on real world sporting events to drive interest in their games. Already Sports illustrated has plans for Facebook-powered Fantasy Football when that sport starts up again, and a few other developers are dipping their toes in the social sports waters.

But why stop at sports? With their quick development times, social games could be deployed to coincide with all sorts of topical real world events, from elections to awards shows. If people are talking about it, it only stands to reason that people would want to game about it too.

This kind of topical gaming is definitely an intriguing potential trend to watch out for in the social games space going forward, and we intend to do just that.