Joel Brodie

It's the time of the month when we take a look at how your favorite Facebook game did for traffic the month before. According to Frisky Mongoose, FarmVille loss 7.7 million people in May 2010. When you combine that with the 4.4 million who left FarmVille in April, you have a "whopping drop of more than 12 million players in just eight weeks." Every pundit keeps blaming the drop on changes on Facebook. But, as Brandy Shaul points maybe this is all about the weather.

The theme of the day for social games is digging for treasure on Facebook. We just spotted a new Facebook game in beta called Treasure Time!and Treasure Madness has just released an update which it calls Treasure Madness 2.

Or, was May 2010 just a really bad month for social gaming? According to our article on this very subject yesterday and an analysis of the data on secondshares, the three leading social game developers Zynga, Playfish, and CrowdStar saw drops in monthly average users (MAU's) by 10.7%, 11.1%, and 12.1%, respectively. To put that in perspective, Zynga has 230 million users so a 10.7% means they loss 26.6 million users in the month of May. That is essentially like losing the entire population of the state of Texas.

CrowdStar, a leading social game developer and creators of such hits as Happy Aquarium and Happy Island, have quietly released Hello City. Hello City looks to be CrowdStar's entry in the city-building simulation/strategy genre on Facebook made popular by Playdom's Social City and influenced by Sid Meier's Civilization series from back in the day. You can be first to check it out but be forewarned - it's brand new so it's a game in progress.

Just in time for the World Cup, EA and Playfish has released EA Sports FIFA Superstars for Facebook. According to the fan page, you can build your team from the world's best soccer/football players and compete against your friends.The game just launched moments ago but we'll follow up with complete coverage. Be first to try out EA Sports FIFA Superstars on Facebook and set an alert to follow our coverage for this game.

It seems that every other day, there is a new farm game (or two) that we find for you to grow crops on, and increasingly, raise animals. Today is no exception. WonderHill has launched FurryFarm and InnoWate has launched http://import.local/facebook-games/mini-farm-planet ">Mini Farm Planet in beta. In none-farming game related social game news, Red Aphid Games have released Feed the Rocker, a musical puzzle game.