Social Pictionary-style game app Draw Something exploded in the iTunes App Store and Android Market just a month or two ago, but a new report suggests the game has had a serious decline that was almost as rapid as its ascent.
According to a story from Develop, OMGPOP’s game saw a massive drop-off in daily active users (DAU) during the month of April. At its peak, Draw Something had pulled in some 15 million players; by the end of the following month, however, that number had taken a five million-DAU hit, dropping some 33 percent in just 30 days.
Update: Forbes is reporting that Draw Something is now losing 5 million users per month since Zynga acquisition.
The numbers come from market analyst firm AppData, which publishes analytics reports about both daily active users and monthly active users for a number of apps on multiple platforms. According to AppData’s website, it gets its sign-in data from Facebook’s APIs by monitoring how many users sign-in to Facebook through certain means. In terms of Draw Something, AppData looks for users who have linked their Facebook accounts to their in-game IDs, then waits to see how many people are getting signed-in to Facebook through the game.
So far, the results have been stark, although it’s tough to say exactly what might be happening. OMGPOP’s game saw some crazy traffic in the last few months, nabbing 50 million downloads in just 50 days, according to Develop. That achievement was a record for the App Store, and remained in place until Rovio Mobile’s Angry Birds Space smashed it, as Angry Birds games are wont to do. That was enough to draw interest from lots of publishers around the iTunes App Store, and finally, OMGPOP was acquired by FarmVille powerhouse Zynga. The Facebook and App Store developer and publisher paid $210 million for OMGPOP, but it seems that ever since then, Draw Something’s popularity has been declining.
Still, even though it seems to have lost a third of its daily users, Draw Something is still pulling in 10 million players on a daily basis, so it’s probably a bit too early to make any big forecasts as to what’s going on with the game. It may be that the Draw Something novelty wore off for many players during the first month. Given the nature of Draw Something and the natural requirement that you be kind of good at drawing things in order to play it, that doesn’t seem like too crazy a scenario.
Surely OMGPOP and Zynga will be watching their DAU numbers carefully in May to see if the downward trend continues. If it does, Zynga will probably start working to find creative ways to keep players involved and drawing.
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