Facebook stats glitch highlights need for independent stat reporting
Tuesday, August 3, 2010Filed under Editorials/Columns , Games.com -- The Blog , Published Works , Video Games.
Cafe World had been sitting comfortably at around 20 million monthly users for the entire month of July. So it was a bit of a surprise when Facebook’s public statistics (as reported by AppData) showed the game’s user base shooting up 75% over a period of three days, to a high of over 35 million monthly players at the end of the month. The change wasn’t limited to Cafe World either — dozens of games saw stratospheric increases in the same period.
Facebook eventually confirmed to Inside Social Games that the sudden increases were due to a bug in their reporting. But this temporary problem highlights the risk of trusting Facebook to report on the success of its own games without independent verification.