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Sims Social Facebook game now more popular than Farmville


Apparently, living vicariously through a virtual avatar is more enjoyable than planting virtual crops, at least in the case of Facebook's two most popular games today—Sims Social and Farmville. The runaway hit between the two, however, is Electronic Arts' (EA) Sims Social, a social-media port of its popular Sims game for PCs, where players get to control a "simulated" human being to do their bidding. Technology blog Mashable reported over the weekend that the number of people playing Sims Social on Facebook eclipsed that of Farmville, with 9.3 million pointing and clicking their mouse pointers on the former compared with the latter's 8.1 million. "Now things are looking even better for EA, and even more serious for Zynga. In just two weeks, Sims Social has leapfrogged nine games, including longstanding Zynga hits Empires & Allies, Texas Hold ‘Em, Pioneer Trail," Mashable said. Two weeks earlier, the same blog reported that Sims Social had racked up 4.6 million users just days after it went out of beta, placing sixth in the list of top 10 games on the social networking platform. Mashable said the fact a users' "sim" (short for simulation, or avatar) gets to interact with the sims of their friends makes the game a far more compelling proposition on Facebook than through its standalone PC versions. "You’re not actually interacting with your friends in real time, but you can view a video replay of what happened when their Sims came over to your Sim’s house," it added. EA is reportedly eyeing the launch of its counterpart game—possibly Sims City—for another of Zynga's popular games called Cityville. The blog noted that over the last few months, usage of Zynga's Farmville has seen a slow decline since its peak of 32 million users last year. In 2010, Zynga reportedly had 39.1 percent global market share of the PC social networking games market, a 4.2-percentage point increase over 2009. In contrast, second-ranked Playfish, which is coincidentally owned by EA, suffered a 3.8-percentage point decline in the same year, despite a 42-percent growth in consumer spending across its properties. In 2010, Farmville was placed among the world's "50 worst inventions" by Time Magazine for its "mindlessness" and being one of the most addictive of all Facebook games. — RSJ, GMA News

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