Airport Madness 3 has been online for exactly five months now.  On Facebook the free version has been played 1,207,555 times, and another 3,523,562 times on game portals worldwide, for a grand total of 5 million plays in 5 months.

As you can see by the graph below, Airport Madness 3 had a very exciting summer.  But in early September, I received a very friendly email from Facebook indicating that my application violated one of the facebook terms, in particular the part about not posting to people’s news feeds without explicit user consent.  I was very quick to correct that, but as you can see the app’s success has suffered as a result of this correction.

Facebook applications are scored by a number called “Monthly Active Users”, or MAU.  Airport Madness 3 on Facebook reached it’s all-time highest MAU on September 8, 2010 having 162,000 users.  Over the following 6 weeks it would plummet to 54,000.  Luckily, over the past month it has risen 10% from that low, daring to break 60,000 this week and projecting to break 70,000 by the New Year.

Game development has a huge learning curve.  It takes only months to learn how to program a game, but it takes years to learn how to promote and distribute your game.