Animal Party hitting 500k MAU; Facebook Credits as currency

Animal Party joined the 6waves publishing network several weeks ago and we’ve been getting more traffic.  We also transitioned our monetization strategy to use Facebook Credits as a in-game currency, which made us eligible for various Facebook promotion that brought in additional traffic.  As a result, we broke 500k MAU for the first time since the game was launched!

Facebook Credits as a currency is definitely has both pros and cons.  While Facebook provides a lot of additional user through their promotion channels, it still remains to be seen if the overall effect on revenue per user will be a positive one.  Many smaller studio like Digital Chocolate have adopted that strategy fully, while bigger studios like Zynga and Playdom are still sticking to their own in-game currency.  This makes sense, because bigger studios don’t really need the Facebook promotion since they already have a very large audience playing their existing games, and they can funnel traffic between their own games through cross promotion.