Although FarmVille maintained its place at the top of the most played social games in 2010, Zynga competed itself and launched the most popular game of the moment, CityVille. According to AddData, CityVille currently has 16.8 million daily captive users, compared to FarmVille 16.4 million. Monthly positions reveal that CityVille is also ahead with 61.7 million users, while FarmVille has only 56.8 million users.

Across the four social games offered by Zynga at present, over 184 active million users play FrontVille, Texas HoldEm Poker, FarmVille and CityVille.  Developer Analytics has reported that the unexpected growth of Zynga’s social games is directly linked with Facebook’s  hundreds of million users, despite changes Facebook made in terms of social media marketing capabilities and incentive methods within one’s social graph.

The collaboration between Zynga and Yahoo on social games proved to be fruitful. A deal between Zynga and Yahoo was signed some time ago, but it was postponed due to the tremendous success of Zynga with Facebook.

Success does not come cheap. Last year, Zynga took Playdom and four former Zynga employees to court on grounds of having disclosed trade secrets and business strategy. The argument was settled with a deal whose terms were not disclosed. Later, in 2010, Zynga again argued in court that Playdom is using Zynga’s ‘Mafia Wars’ advertising in the same way to promote Playdom’s ‘Mobsters’. Before the two parties settled, Zynga had previously won a preliminary injunction.