The Top 10 Most Influential People in Facebook and Social Games

Updated
Top 10
Top 10

Facebook games have attracted some of the most popular figures in the game industry since their dawn about four years ago. The past two years alone saw more video game veterans than we care to count leave the world of shooters and strategy games behind for Facebook. That said, we decided it was about time to see how these game design and business juggernauts sized up against one another after PeekYou approached us with a way to do so.

PeekYou, a search company focused on indexing the web around people, also runs PeekScore. This service ranks people on a scale of 1 to 10 based on their influence across the Internet. The score takes active and passive content creation into account, the former being social media use and blogging, and the latter being mentions in online news outlets, archives and databases.

However, we had to populate the list with 10 names. In an attempt at fairness, we took to AppData's developer leaderboard, but also peppered the list with industry transplants of note. We're certain we've glossed over some video game veterans, but did you really want a list of 30 people? So, feel free to give us your two cents in the comments. (We've put on our flame-retardant suits already.) Here are the top 10 most influential people in Facebook and social games:

Rank

Picture

Name

Bio

PeekScore

1

John Romero


John Romero

Co-founder, Loot Drop

8.06 / 10.00

2

Richard Garriott


Richard Garriott

Co-founder, Portalarium

8.05 / 10.00

3

Mark Pincus


Mark Pincus

CEO, Zynga

8.04 / 10.00

4

Brian Reynolds


Brian Reynolds

Game Designer, Zynga

8.03 / 10.00

5

Raph Koster


Raph Koster

VP of Creative Design, Playdom

8.02 / 10.00

6

Kristian Segerstrale


Kristian Segerstrale

Co-founder, Playfish

8.01 / 10.00

7

Trip Hawkins


Trip Hawkins

Founder, Digital Chocolate

8.01 / 10.00

8

John Pleasants


John Pleasants

CEO, Playdom

8.00 / 10.00

9

John Vechey


John Vechey

Co-founder, PopCap Games

7.83 / 10.00

10

Jens Begemann


Jens Begemann

CEO, Wooga

7.45 / 10.00



Do you know of any social game designers or executives that you would have put on the list? Share with us in the comments, but be nice about it, won't ya? Add Comment.

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