[Every other week, Gamasutra examines the most popular Facebook games according to monthly active users, looking at the top titles and developers on the social network to see who's attracting or losing players.] When Zynga recently launched The Ville, its take on Maxis and Electronic Arts' popular series The Sims, it struggled to find an audience at first. When we last looked at the title a week ago, though, it had suddenly exploded in popularity, picking up 16 million monthly players. That rapid growth has continued into this week, as its userbase has doubled to 32.5 million players, and it's now the second most popular social game on Facebook, just behind another Zynga title, Texas HoldEm Poker (and now ahead of other big releases from the company like Bubble Safari, CityVille and FarmVille). It would not be surprising to see The Ville become the most popular game on the site very soon, but it's worth noting that many of Zynga's other top titles -- with the exception of Texas HoldEm Poker -- have been taking a hit during The Ville's rise, losing around 1 to 2 million users each in the last two weeks. Electronic Arts has its own version of The Sims on Facebook, The Sims Social, and though it was once one of the biggest titles on the site -- with over 50 million monthly users just 10 months ago -- it's audience has since shrunk significantly, and now has 16.9 million players. But at least The Sims Social is showing a little growth, adding 1.4 million users in the last two weeks. Electronic Arts' new Facebook edition of SimCity, or SimCity Social, is performing well, too. The city-building sim is now the 18th most popular game on the site with 10.7 million users. You can see the full list of the top 20 Facebook games along with exact monthly active user counts below: 
All charts and data are courtesy of Facebook application metrics and trends site AppData.
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