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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.

As originally published at Games.com and later highlighted by Silicon Alley Insider.
No one questions whether sharing news or photos with friends and family is a fad, and when people get together to socialize, they often play games – from bridge to charades to Trivial Pursuit. As one of the largest social gathering spots on [...]

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 [...]

A funny thing happened to Facebook’s open platform – game developers took the opportunity and ran with it, even taking over the core of the service for a while. By this fall, parts of the site had become overrun with users trying to get their friends to join them on their farm, help their mafia [...]

When Zynga stopped cross-promoting their synchronous poker game, it signalled that asynchronous game play may be the better long-term game mechanic for the Facebook platform. I look at the stages of Zynga’s social game development and how the fast growing audience has responded to earlier games. I also see a growing disconnect, where games are pushing the boundaries of users social bonds, subtly coercing users to befriend strangers to unlock new items and levels and wonder if a better filtering mechanism could help the growth of both Facebook, game developers and users.