I recently did a quick and dirty analysis of the top 25 English games on Facebook to see the split between competitive, cooperative, and self image showcasing games by Monthly actives.

This is how I defined whether a game fit in each category. If the primary motivation of the game was to:

1. improve your level in the game through some scoring system I considered it competitive, even if this involved some aspect of cooperation
2. share  and stay in touch with your friends through in game actions,  show off your existence/space to your friends I classified it as cooperative. These games have no comparative scoring level distinguishing one friend from another
3. demonstrate your personality without having any actions that were social in nature

Here are the results. About:

• 80% were games where users competed with their friends
• 14% were games where users cooperated with their friends to create a fun or cute experience
• 4% were games that allowed users to show case to their friends some fact about their personal image

If the first 25 English Facebook games are anything to go by, you should all be making games that let players compete with their real friends. But then again as all you smart readers know many more considerations go into the making of a social app. ;-) Considerations like whether the app is social? engaging? universal?

More on that later.

*Data taken from InsideSocial games top apps Facebook blog post. To see the calculations done for this analysis in manipulatable form please visit this spreadsheet

Similar Posts:

• Restaurant Life Brings Quality New Ingredients to Social Restaurant Gaming
• Why game companies need me.
• Jinsoo Park talks about Zoodak, his new fantasy stock trading game
• Tricks for Facebook you may not know!
• Facebook’s new profile completeness bar. Does it add any value?

Popularity: 26% [?]