Farmville is currently the most successful game on Facebook, attracting over 35 million monthly unique users. The game is relatively new, having launched on June 19. Players create and manage virtual farms, with connectivity to friends through the Facebook social network. They can also purchase virtual items such as plants, animals, and buildings.

How did Farmville become the top Facebook game?

First of all, note the Farmville is a straight knock-off of another popular game called Farm Town. If you’ve played Farm Town, you won’t need any education about how to use Zynga’s version of the game, since it’s almost an exact copy. As industry analysts humorously point out, the only additional feature Farmville needs is “the ability to import the game from Farm Town over to Farmville as a tool to take over the users.”

Second, note that Farmville focuses extensively on friend interactions. In Farmville, users can visit their friends’ farms and add them as neighbors. Farmville is viral as it focuses on interactions among friends, not strangers. In Farm Town, however, users interact with their neighbors, who are not necessarily their friends.

Third, Farmville provides a better user experience than Farmtown. If you’ve played Farm Town, it probably did not take you too long to notice the bugs. Often times you would click on a plot of land in Farm Town, and it does not respond. That doesn’t happen in Farmville.

So for better or for worse, Farmville is taking off where Farm Town left it off, and is poised to take over the “social farming” space. Farmville has successfully removed all the kinks and now all what’s left is viral growth. In addition, Zynga is also investing in a large ad campaign which has been showing up all the time on Facebook. Not surprising considering that this is a typical strategy for Marc Pincus. They are rumored to spend over $50 Million on ads altogether. The company continues to grow due to aggressive marketing strategies, even if that includes blatantly copying others and overspending on ads.