Wooga has leapfrogged Electronic Arts to become the number two games company on Facebook in terms of daily active users (DAU). The news comes after the Berlin-based firm revealed earlier this week its astonishing growth – 185 percent over the past year. It can now turn its attention to monthly active users (MAU), where it remains third.
The number of users playing Wooga games each month has soared to 40 million, up from 14 million in January 2011.
And according to Appdata, Wooga’s daily figure is now at 9,811,000, compared to 9,685,971 for EA. The company has seen an astonishing rise to prominence in three years, producing six flash apps and two mobile games. Last May’s $24 million investment round, led by Highland Capital Partners, has helped the company expand its user base and develop new games Diamond Dash and Magic Land both on Facebook and on mobile.
Wooga was briefly at number two for DAU last year, before EA bought Popcap and added the latter’s figures to its own. The MAU data is seen as the more important key performance indicator as it reflects the retention of users. But the latest jump in DAU rankings will still be a boost for Wooga.
Founder and CEO Jens Begemann discussed the company’s growth at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, ans said: “If you really focus on the platform and you really focus on having a great user experience. For us, it’s really most organic. Advertising is roughly 5 percent of new users for us; 40 percent is viral and 55 percent is through cross promotion.” Begemann also revealed that 2012 would see Wooga focus more on mobile.
“We’ve kicked off as many projects for mobile as we have for social. We’ve brought our IP to iOS like Diamond Dash and we see that this works very well,” he added. “It really helped when we launched that we had the core fan base download everything because that brought us to the charts and then we attracted many many new users.”