parislemon:

*based on things other than popularity

Yesterday, Facebook made waves by revealing that a game called Gardens of Time was the “most popular” game on their platform in 2011. The only problem? It’s total bullshit.

Only after Josh Constine called them out, did Facebook highlight the fact that “most popular” didn’t actually have much to do with number of people actually playing the games as much as it was based on ratings of the games from a select group of users. 

Why does this matter? Because Gardens of Time isn’t made by Zynga, the social game company that dominates Facebook’s platform. It sure looks like Facebook was trying to convey that their platform isn’t dominated by Zynga. As Constine puts it:

It’s almost as if Facebook used its cloudy methodology to keep Zynga from completely dominating the list, as the Mark Pincus machine currently owns all 5 Facebook games with the most DAU and still ended up with 4 of the top 10 spots on Facebook’s list.

Facebook’s post and list are disingenuous at best, pure jackassery at worst.

As Constine points out, Zynga’s CityVille had a peak of 100 million monthly active users. Gardens of Time had a peak of 17 million monthly active users. Which one would you say is the “most popular”?