Yesterday the New Year's Resolutions Event started at 2am. The beauty of this event is we can get a more accurate estimate of how many active Mafia Wars players are out there than we can by looking at the Facebook application metrics. Each time a player redeems a vote, it is added to the total number of votes.
I ran a script created by Team Spockholm when the event hit the 24 hour mark. The script shows the total number of votes for each of the six loot items. There were a total of 239,156 votes in 24 hours.
According to the
AppData Mafia Wars Page (via Facebook application metric reports), there are 560,000 daily active users. The scary part of all this is many players voted multiple times so the number of 239,156 can't really be used to compare to the daily metrics. The real number is probably much lower. The bottom line is the application metrics are extremely inflated. They are only useful because you can compare values over time but they do not accurately reflect the number of active players.
It's not very often that Zynga allows us to see a better picture of how many players actually exist. The last time we had any in game voting was about a year ago during the Cast Your Vote Event
(1). Players were allowed to vote once an hour and could vote for all three categories if they wanted to. There were only 1,163,743 votes during a 8 day time frame.
When this event started, there were 2,722,917 daily active users according the application metrics.
Jan 19th 2010
Las Vegas brought us events that contained in game statistics. Zynga promised if 30 million community jobs were performed than District 6 would unlock. The job could only be performed once per day by each player
(1).
It was estimated that it would take approximately 17 days to get to 30 million jobs but it only took 15
(1). The job progress meter moved extra fast on the last day and many suspected that Zynga might have messed with the data.
There was also a visitor counter tracking how many players went to Las Vegas for the first time. We were promised that a real armor trick would blow up when the counter hit 10 million. We never did find out who won the 25,000 Grand Prize!
It was estimated that it would take about 18days. Like the community job, the counter got faster towards the end.
Zynga delivered on their promise and nobody will forget the day that Snoop Dogg blew up the Armored Truck in Las Vegas
(1).
Las Vegas and the associated events created a huge spike in the daily active users and they were reported to be over 9 million. Mafia Wars has not come a long way and Zynga should be embarrassed by how few players are left.
July 5-August 4 2010
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zynga wre probably making a sad face by now
ReplyDeleteHey, what was the script you ran to find out how many votes had gone to each of the characters? I would like to run it and make sure I'm voting for the winner ;)
ReplyDeleteAnother great post Jenn!!! Thanks for all you do, it is much appreciated!
ReplyDeleteLet's say that on avarage all active players had 6 votes yesterday, that would end up on under 40 000 players in all. Ergo this game will probably be shut down within the first quarter of 2012.
ReplyDeleteYou should also consider that probably around 30% of DAU's are also playing mini accounts as well
ReplyDeleteBeing a numbers guy myself, I like seeing that you post the DAU and MAU on Mafia Wars. I wonder if Zynga is actually using the New Year's Resolution to more accurately track how many players are using/participating in the special events? And if so, if they plan on using this data to either invest in OR diverge from the MW game itself?
ReplyDeleteFrom a marketing aspect, if Zynga is using this as a model to decide on the future of the game, they chose a bad time to do it. Even though some countries/players do not celebrate Christmas due to cultural diversity...everyone celebrates New Year's and some players may be traveling and/or not accessible to the game itself during this time period.
Finally, you mentioned that several players may have voted several times (myself included)...I wonder how many players have not voted yet?
Happy Holidays to you and your staff and thanks for the hard work ya'll do!
Ms. PAC Party has 93844 votes so far and is now in your inventory.
ReplyDeleteMs. PAC Party's strength will increase if it is voted among the top three!
Ms. PAC Party has 94117 votes so far and is now in your inventory.
ReplyDeleteMs. PAC Party's strength will increase if it is voted among the top three!
Ms. PAC Party has 96776 votes so far and is now in your inventory.
ReplyDeleteMs. PAC Party's strength will increase if it is voted among the top three!
Hi LootLady! I just Wonder that you have this flag counter thing can`t it be used to count how much Active players are still aroud. Thank for your great work
ReplyDeleteHannu
I wouldn't go by any of those numbers since a lot of people are sitting on their votes waiting to see which item has the most votes
ReplyDeleteor that Snoop step in front of the camera just as the truck blew up
ReplyDeleteanother MW player bites the dust with FB disabling Gabrielle Burnett saying "she is not a real person" ...pfffffttttttt
ReplyDeleteWhat our family have been doing is posting in a topic on our family group page every time we vote we cut and paste the current total of votes for that henchman/woman. Nobody is being steered to vote for any particular one but at least we have the up to date figures to make an informed decision ourselves (some want one of each for their collection).
ReplyDeleteOf course one day, during a holiday for many people will not give a statisticaly accurate or even a valid number if u go by pure statistical analysis, for daily players. However, throwing statistically valid math and science out the window for a sec....A daily player is usually a player who has formed a routine or habit overtime. Therefore, unless a computer was unavailable, hardcore daily players would have probably checked in at least. Allowing for 15% that couldn't, and accepting the guess that 25% of DAU's have 2 accounts, and 15% voted twice through one account, that leaves:189,000 estimated DUA. Then subtaract 15% of this number that don't play EVERYDAY and you have a very, overestimated total of 172k DUA. And intuition would tell me 150k or lower. A far cry from 9 million, 4 million, 1 million, and now 500+k sited. A graph would show there would be under at or under a 100k within 4 months. Eventually the drop would level off if the game is still supported at around 50k hardcore DUA's. Then drop to 25k DUA's by the end of 2012. And these would be the hardcore players. 25k from 2-4 estimated DUA's within 2 years is a death sign. There will be no more lower levels except for mini accounts and all people will lose interest.
ReplyDeleteI only play MW out of Zynga games. I have tried poker (many ,many web sites and competition) and Farmville, Cityville, vampire???.....but as a DUA for only 14 months, with a 3 month break in which I really only missed the forums, groups etc occasionally, I can say as a relative new comer, it was only the FB groups and clans etc...and websites such as yours that kept my interest and renewed my interest in playing. I could not imagine plsying any of these other Zynga games, let alone spend any money, if not for yhe active FB groups, clans etc and blohs like yours And a continuous influx of new players. I just don't see it happening or even possible. Especially in regards to an influx of new players which is essential for everyone playing the game.
ReplyDeletezynga is a greed based company ! they do not listen or care about players.The game mafia wars was at one time enjoyable, zynga killed that with greed. They are not competent enough to run the game. They will just keep rolling out stupid thing after stupid thing without getting the last 10 stupid things fixed and running right. I quit playing because of their greed and incompetence.If you play, do yourself a favor, stop go outside and see the world that is passing you by !!!
ReplyDeletego outside !! Zynga is a greed based company. Stop spending your life playing a destined to die game. I stopped playing and could not be more pleased about it. I have real hobbies that get tangible rewards, zynga = incompetence !!!
ReplyDelete