CityVille is a success (so Zynga, maybe you can dial down the emails a bit?)

So, how is CityVille, Zynga’s latest game, doing so far a week after launch?

In the words of Larry David from Curb your Enthusiasm, “pretty pretty good.” Within 24 hours, 290,000 people were playing CityVille (compared to 116,000 players in FrontierVille the first day of that game). Within a week, according to David Ko (Zynga SVP Mobile), CityVille saw 3 million daily active users.

Which is cool, because maybe the game is doing well enough, someone at Zynga will realize that their rocking email system that sends me an email notification every time someone I know invites me to play, sends me a gift, or sends a reminder of someone sending me a zoning permit that I ignored since it’s clogging my email box, may actually tone down their email notifications a bit.

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So, how is CityVille, Zynga’s latest game, doing so far a week after launch?

In the words of Larry David from Curb your Enthusiasm, “pretty pretty good.”

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Within 24 hours, 290,000 people were playing CityVille (compared to 116,000 players in FrontierVille the first day of that game). Within a week, according to David Ko (Zynga SVP Mobile), CityVille saw 3 million daily active users.

Which is cool, because maybe the game is doing so well, someone at Zynga will realize that their rocking email system that sends me an email notification every time someone I know invites me to play, sends me a gift, or sends a reminder of someone sending me a zoning permit that I ignored since it’s clogging my email box, may actually tone down their email notifications a bit.

Seriously, since I started to play CityVille a week ago, I have gotten between 50 – 100 Zynga mail notifications. And it’s starting to annoy me.

With Facebook removing game notifications within its main viral channels, Zynga embarked on mission to add notifications through its Zynga game bar within the game and through emails. The problem is that tons of thought went into all the ways that Zynga can email players directly if they click once the option to get game credit for agreeing to opt in to email, but not much on the fine line between notifying one of game updates and annoying gamers with spam.

It’s funny. Whereas I believe Facebook has gone too far in removing game notifications from its network, Zynga has gone the opposite route in notifying players via email of every single minute change or game update.

The solution is a messaging system that works right in the middle of how Facebook and Zynga works.

The problem with all these email messages it’s started to really drive me crazy. Though I am enjoying CityVille a lot, all these messages from Zynga is making me regret that I founded my city “Monkeyville” (yes, greatest city name ever) a week ago. Which is too bad, Monkeyville has the makings to become the greatest virtual city of monkeys and humanoids ever.