King.com Overtakes Zynga For Top Spot On Facebook

You might not have heard of casual social game developing studio King.com, but they just bumped Zynga from the top spot on Facebook with their new game Candy Crush Saga. It has attracted 9.7 million daily players on Facebook so far, and King.com is now the second largest game publisher on Facebook, with over 70 million monthly active users across all of their games.

According to AppData, Candy Crush Saga knocked Zynga's FarmVille 2 from the number one spot, marking the first time a King.com game has been ranked number one on AppData. In total, King.com has three games in Facebook's top 10 as far as daily active users are concerned. These are Pet Rescue Saga (with 3.2 million daily users), Bubble Witch Saga (3.6 million daily users), and obviously Candy Crush Saga.

Alex Dale, Chief Marketing Officer at King.com, says that a bug part of the company's rapid growth and success has to do with the increased popularity casual games, and the declined interest in the resource management genre. Dale mentions that more and more people don't have time for resource management games, so that's why many of the Saga games have taken off.

Dale also mentions the strong appeal for puzzle games in this day and age, even after the glory days of Tetris. He mentions that "people have always liked solving puzzles," and with the addition of a social layer, gamers are playing with friends, "which makes the experience more viral."

[via Forbes]