You may remember our recent story on the introduction of Facebook for the iPad. Well on the back of Facebook games now being available on these mobile devices, the way in which users are measured has been altered, significantly.

Many major Facebook game developers saw a sharp drop in their amount of active users since this change has been implemented.

Changes were made to the way Facebook counts active users on applications to only count those who are logged in.This means that users who hit the permissions' dialogue but choose to not authenticate the app, or who visit the app without logging in (for those apps that allow that behaviour), will no longer be included in active user counts.

Some 'popular gaming titles on Facebook have seen a drop by as much as 50% in their overall user figures.

These new figures are simply a more 'realistic up-front representation' of data that already existed. Facebook had previously reported 'actual traffic' to their games in this way, but reported game user counts a little differently, now the figures are comparable.

What does this mean in real figures?

• For Zynga's newly-launched Adventure World, it dropped 58 per cent from 39.4 million to 16.4 million.
• CityVille fell from 76 million to 55 million,
• Electronic Arts - The Sims Social dropped from 65 million to 42 million.

Facebook also adjusted its reporting methods in August last year, discounting users who just 'liked' apps from the total count - a change that also saw a drop in figures for developers.

Changes such as this could perhaps be further evidence that Facebook is tidying up its figures for its much rumoured stock market float in 2012.

Good news for game developers such as Zynga, as they now have solid detail of their active user counts to base further developments on.

Via [Facebook Dev Blog]

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