FarmVille loses 4.4m players in a month

FarmVille, the most popular game on Facebook, lost 4.4 million players in April - a 5.3 per cent drop that saw player numbers fall from 82.7 million to 78.3 million.

However, it remains more than twice as popular on Facebook as the next game, Birthday Cards, which had 34.2 million players in April.

Inside Social Games' list of the most popular Facebook games for April shows that 18 of the top 25 suffered a drop in monthly active users.

The site identifies Facebook's removal of third-party notifications, which previously told players about new developments in games, as the main reason for the decline.

Player numbers are expected to fall further in May because Facebook is also eliminating gift requests from its pages, meaning you can only send or receive them within the game itself.

Recent FarmVille outages could also cause players to abandon their virtual farms. The game was down for several hours yesterday, leaving many players frustrated and angry.

An announcement on the official Zynga blog blamed "some problems with our servers" for the downtime.

Despite the Facebook changes, Zynga - which owns FarmVille - saw two of its games increase in popularity during April - PetVille and Texas HoldEm Poker. Zynga's chief executive Mark Pincus said that he expects the fall in numbers to only be "short term".