In the first 24 hours of release, more than 290,000 people gave CityVille a shot. FrontierVille, which had previously held Zynga's "biggest game launch" title, saw 116,000 players its first day.
As we noted last week, CityVille is kind of a mashup between FarmVille and Sim City. One of the big new features of the game is that friends can set up "franchise" businesses on another friend's game board.
In the first 24 hours, Zynga tells us that 25% of players have decided to create franchises in their friend's cities. Additionally, 2.7 million houses and more than 500,000 bakeries have been built.
FrontierVille was Zynga's last high-profile game launch and it managed to gain 5 million daily players in just under two weeks. Six months later, more than 6.5 million people play the game every day.
Casual social games have been one of the most enduring trends of 2010. It seems only natural that Zynga would wrap up the year with a hit right out of the gate.