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The top games on Facebok are down 11% from their highs this month. While it looks like it might be due to the holidays, the successive declines in the peaks of the latest Zynga releases might suggest the life cycle for social games is changing.

After being fairly quiet since early August’s launch of (Lil) Farm Life, Playdom launched two games in the last two weeks: TikiFarm (a South Pacific themed farm sim) and Wild Ones (an artillery/strategy game with pets – still in alpha).
CrowdStar and Zynga have been greatly accelerating the deployment of games and it’s possible [...]

All of the major game developers have launched a game with Facebook’s Credit payment system, with CrowdStar implementing them in all their games. This is a rundown of those implementations and the potential pros and cons for developers as we near Facebook’s official launch of their credits system.

PetVille gets massive ad campaign to jump grow over 2 million daily active users in a day; Zynga starts promoting some synchronous games; Playfish still seeing DAU traffic down since EA acquisition; Bejeweled Blitz gets some competition for gem-swapping audience.

Crowd Star’s Happy Aquarium jumped 22% over the weekend to enter the top 5, unseating former #1, Farm Town. With cross promotion of other recent games, can CrowdStar join Zynga and Playfish as a major developer in the social space?