EVCin

FarmVille bucks the no-growth trend, passing 30 million by twisting the “gifting” mechanism from sending gifts to asking for gifts.

Incorporating Facebook Credits may make you a Featured Game on the new Games Dashboard, but it doesn’t necessarily drive you new traffic. Plus the intriguing reach of STi’s prepaid-phone-cards-turned-virtual-goods-gift-card.

Zynga innovates with a progress bar to get users to sign up for mutliple communication devices. Playfish’s Gangster City doesn’t look like it’s sticky enough as DAUs flatten out. And Zynga Poker touts 6 million daily users – but they still haven’t reached that number yet on Facebook.

Facebook game developers knew changes to the homepage were coming, but the details were still a little fuzzy. Games have all but been removed from the homepage, the only exception being the new Games Dashboard (and even that link is not really being promoted to users very prominently).

Looking back at Facebook’s changes to how application developers could use the platform, developers have mostly complied with prohibitions forcing users to give gifts before playing the game on first and recurring visits. Yet the largest developers seem to still be allowed to gate content (like land expansions) based on the number of friends a user has – continuing to put pressure on people who do not want to spend money to extend their social graph to potential strangers in order to unlock content.