Tag Archives: Stealing

For Fish Sim Games, Does Stealing Make Them Stickier?

As you might expect with the Thanksgiving holidays, the growth in the top fish sim games appeared to wane as we focused on real-life relationships and turkey dinners:

All the fish sim games remained flat or declined their daily active user numbers over Thanksgiving

Across the board, daily users for each of the fish sim games flat-lined during Thanksgiving (although the reporting tool failed to provide new numbers for Sunday the 29th and Monday the 30th of November, most games were flat or down Thanksgiving week). In addition, for Zynga’s FishVille we’re seeing the social game sticky factor (Daily Active Users/Monthly Active Users) declining and it looks like it might settle at a 28-30% Sticky Factor similar to CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium and TallTree Games’s Fish World:

As FishVille's sticky factor comes down to the level of rivals Happy Aquarium and Fish World, My Fishbowl maintains a sticky factor 33% higher than any of them

In this group, 6 WavesMy Fishbowl continues to have the strongest sticky factor, a good 33% higher than other fish sim games with over 1 million Daily Active Users (DAU). I believe their success is primarily due to the fact that it is the only one of the four top fish sim games natively coded in Chinese, which is allowing it to take advantage of Facebook’s rapid growth in Southeast Asia. In addition, it may also have something to do with the fact that My Fishbowl has a strong game element of “stealing” from your neighbors’ tanks (if your friends are late to collect the treasures produced by their fish, you can go in and steal these treasures for yourself).

Read the rest of the analysis, plus the impact on developers looking to grow into Asia and other fast-growing Facebook regions, at InsideSocialGames.com