PetVille nears 1 million players in four days

PetVille, the new Facebook game from Zynga, quietly launched on December 3. The pet simulation game lets you custom create a pet, their home and then set out to earn as many coins as possible by performing different tasks, such as cleaning your pet and visiting neighbors.

Over the weekend, we noticed that Zynga turned on the publicity machine, running ads for the game on Facebook and in its other games, and the number of players climbed from a modest 22K to nearly one million in the past few days, according to AppData.

The question remains, will this game take over Pet Society's position as top pet game on Facebook? The rival Facebook game has been holding steady at around 21 million players for the past month, so PetVille still has a ways to go before it's in barking distance.