Due to Facebook's recent decision to limit the notifications proliferated by third-party applications -- Join my Mafia! Feed my Goldfish! Become a Vampire! Fight my Pirates, etc. -- the creators of games which appear on the social networking site are beginning to see their player bases decrease dramatically. Gamasutra reports that 12 of the top 25 Facebook games saw more than one million players leave in May, while the worldwide FarmVille community lost more than 7.7 million of its agricultural inhabitants.

It's unclear how these losses affect the pocketbooks of social game developers such as Zynga -- its entirely possible that these quitters weren't purchasing in-game content in the first place. However, it's definitely creating some negative consequences for our untended, expansive soybean fields.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/06/fa...ing-user-base/