Facebook has announced its 25 most popular social games for 2012, with music trivia game SongPop taking the title as best rated game.
The ‘name that tune’ game, in which users have to guess the name of the song or artist from a brief audio sample, soared in popularity this year, with much of its success due to its multi-platform nature.
Facebook said that the list was compiled based on how long users spend playing a game and how highly it has been rated by the community.
In second place was the Facebook.com-only Dragon City game, where players breed their own dragons. Physics-based motorcycle game, Bike Race, rounded out the top three.
The leaders beat a raft of titles from Zynga, including OMGPOP’s Draw Something, which it bought earlier this year. The Pictionary-style game soared to popularity earlier this year.
Social gaming market leader Zynga still managed to squeeze six titles into the top 25 with Farmville 2, Scramble with Friends and Draw Something all making the top 10.
In a post on its Newsroom blog, Facebook’s head of European gaming partnerships, Julian Cordoniou wrote: “In the social games world this year we saw the emergence of new categories of games, high quality graphics and immersive gameplay, and games built by big and small developers from around the world.
“It was the most diverse and global year for social games to date – for those on Facebook.com, as well as games built with Facebook for iPhone, iPad and Android.”
It was the most international year for social games. The majority of games came from outside the U.S., ranging from France, Spain and the U.K. to Brazil, South Korea, Australia, and Turkey.
It was a big year for action/arcade games too, with most of the apps falling into the relatively new category.
Fifty six percent of the games are available on Facebook.com, while the remaining 44% are social mobile games (available on iPhone, iPad and Android).
Facebook’s top rated games of the year:
• SongPop (FreshPlanet)
• Dragon City (Social Point)
• Bike Race (Top Free games)
• Subway Surfers (Kiloo)
• Angry Birds Friends (Rovio)
• FarmVille 2 (Zynga)
• Scramble with Friends (Zynga)
• Clash of Clans (Supercell)
• Marvel: Avengers Alliance (Playdom)
• Draw Something (Zynga)
• Hay Day (Supercell)
• Baseball Heroes (Syntasia)
• ChefVille (Zynga)
• CSR Racing (NaturalMotion Games)
• Candy Crush Saga (King.com)
• Matching With Friends (Zynga)
• Legend Online (OASIS GAMES)
• Jurassic Park Builder (Ludia)
• Dungeon Rampage (Rebel Entertainment)
• Pockie Ninja II Social (NGames Limited)
• Jetpack Joyride (Halfbrick)
• Social Empires (Social Point)
• Bil ve Fethet (Peak Games)
• Ruby Blast Adventures (Zynga)
• Pyramid Solitaire Saga (King.com)
Methodology
This list was generated using the same ranking system we use in the App Center, based on both star ratings by users, positive and negative user signals and engagement levels between the date range of January 12, 2012 –November, 10, 2012. You can learn more about how the App Center recommendation engine ranks apps here. The list takes into account games that launched in 2012 on Facebook.com, as well as mobile games integrated with Facebook. It only includes those games with at least 100,000 monthly active Facebook users.
