Who's the most Engaging?: Top Gaming Sites Ranked by Average Time Spent

Yesterday, I compiled a list of socnets courtesy of Compete.com new Ranked Lists Feature. Today, it's something nearer and dearer to our hearts: gaming sites. Some of these sites you may not be familiar with, so I added a brief description.

If you don't see a site listed, it's because it didn't make it into Compete's top 200 sites by total time spent.

Game Sites Listed by Average Time Spent (May 2008)
1. Pogo.com: 819.77 (casual games + social networking features. Part of EA)
2. Gaiaonline: 318.45 (forums + avatars + games + social networking features)
3. Neopets: 198.66 (games + avatars + virtual world -kinda. Part of MTVnetworks)
4. King.com: 169.91 (skill games)
5. Worldwinner: 168.25 (skill games)
6. Popcap.com: 120.72 (casual games)
7. Millsberry.com: 115.46 (casual games, virtual world - kinda. Part of General Mills)
8. Gamehouse.com: 102.80 (casual games)
9. BigFishgames: 94.79 (casual games)
10. Shockwave.com: 82.66 (casual games. Part of MTVnetworks)
11. Iwon: 55.51 (casual games + sweepstakes. Part of IAC)
12. Club Penguin: 54.51 (kids virtual world. Part of Disney)
13. Funbrain.com: 45.35 (kids educational games)
14. Miniclip: 42.55 (Flash games)
15. Webkinz: 42.38 (kids virtual world)
16. Addicting Games: 29.91 (Flash games)
17. Ign.com: 17.03 (hard-core games news. Part of Fox)

Looking at this list, the first thing I thought of is a quote from Andrew Pedersen, GM of Pogo.com in a presentation he gave at Casual Connect last year, which is from memory some I'm probably mangling it.

Games are the honey, but community is the glue.

The top three sites on this list have extremely deep community features. However, it looks like money can be nearly as powerful of a draw since skill gaming sites are 4 and 5, so I'll coin a new aphorism.

Game are the honey, but they're not paying me enough at this stupid job, so I better earn some money on your site, dammit!

Not as catchy.

I will also note the absence of hard-core games, that's not due to any lack of addictiveness on their part, in fact, hard-core game are generally more addictive, but they are accessed through a downloadable client and not through a web browser.

Also, it's interesting to note that Fox doesn't have more of a present in casual games. Perhaps, they might be a potential acquirer down the line.

Top Ten Games on Facebook with Detailed Demographics

Note: DAU = Daily Active Users (which is the metric this list is based on)

Brief Analysis:
Despite all the recent posturings by Zynga and SGN, neither companies has more than one game in the top ten. That honor goes to Blake Commagere.

Most games, with one exception, have a significantly higher ratio of male players. Does this mean men play more games? Answer: No. It means that no one is making games that appeal to female players - I'll post on that in the future.

Interesting bits:

• Jetman has virtually no users over 26.
• Scrabulous (and Vampires!!!) has an equal male-female ratio.

Come back tomorrow, I'll be posting the demographic breakdown of all the top games from Zynga and SGN.

Special thanks to www.developeranalytics.com for providing the demographic info!

Track the Release of New Games via GigaGamez

For what John and I are doing, it helps to keep abreast of game industry trends. Generally, I rely on Gamasutra and GameDaily Biz News to keep me up-to-date. Often times, I find the amount of information that provide me to be a little much.

So I really appreciate GigaGamez summarizing the new game releases coming out for the quarter in one or two digestible articles. At the moment they don't appear to be covering new casual game releases, which is fine, because there is at least one casual game a day being released, and since they are mostly clones of existing titles, I don't think it's important to track.

When it comes to casual games, it is more informative to track the best sellers, and game-sales-charts.com does an amazing job at that.

Anyway, props to Jason McMaster over at GigaGamez and James C. Smith over at game-sales-charts.com for consolidating this info for lazy bastards like me.