Two weeks of vacation and FarmVille still keeps on ticking:

• In the three weeks since I noted the launch of achievements, the daily active users has gone from 7.2 million to 11.7 million (a 62% increase based on Developer Analytics numbers). Former number one Facebook game, Farm Town, has stalled by only growing 3% during that period, from 5.41 to 5.56 million.
• FarmVille also dominated Farm Town in the number of “gifts” from that accumulated while I was gone (42 vs. 14) and the number of new friends playing FarmVille nearly doubled (while I’d like to also see the Facebook Lexicon numbers showing the number of times the brands were mentioned on status and wall posts, the data hasn’t been updated since mid-June).
• While visiting a family farm outside Jever, my son got to drive the Harvester (see right) – while in the world of Facebook, tractors and harvesters provide a brand new virtual good opportunity that power users are likely to pay for: relieving some of the grind/tedium in the game.
• The final sign that Farmville is dominating the planet: While at a restaurant in Heidelberg, Germany I saw the waiter’s computer screen turned to Farmville on Facebook.

Zynga is showing how to truly leverage the community of players, continually introducing new features and responding to user feedback to develop new items (see Zynga Exec Spills Beans on FarmVille Success). Zynga is doing the same around Mafia Wars, with a new expansion pack to Russia launching soon: the update has revived the audience over the last three weeks (growing 30% from 4.02 million to 5.22 million), nearly catching Farm Town for the number two spot.

The days of gaining success by just putting an application or game on Facebook and milking it are dead: you need to continually engage the audience, monitor their feedback, and continually develop and tailor the game. As part of this new era of social gaming, developers now must ensure they create a platform that allows easy expansion and devote on-going resources to continually update their games. What seems different about FarmVille is the speed of change, with new features coming out nearly every week – a pace no other game to date has been able to achieve. To some extent, this is a morphing of MMORPGs and the social space. With the ability to gather feedback, develop and respond quickly to delight and retain customers, the success of social games make you question the long-term viability of the launch-and-its-done reality of console games.