TO Many of us, at some point, fell in love with our smartphones. In the early days of Android and iPhone, apps seemed designed to delight: if you spent a few pounds in the app store in 2010, you could be playing a fun game, often involving birds, or tinkering with a lightsaber within minutes. Social media apps designed for phones allowed us to post witty, casual photos with a few taps, for our friends to heart. At the time, it was fun.
But over time, it became a toxic relationship. The fun went out of it all. Social media transformed into a hell designed to trap and infuriate us, providing us with fair Enough of our friends’ posts to stop us from abandoning the platform and prioritising its own algorithmic ads and videos. Twitter used to be cat jokes and memes and now it’s… well, it’s X, and I know I’m not the only one who’s deleted it from their phone entirely. The experience of using apps, phones and the internet in general has degraded significantly, and the same can be said for mobile games, most of which now give you around 83 seconds of entertainment before trying to extort you for a £7.99 monthly subscription or showing you misleading ads that are so mesmerisingly awful you can’t look away.
And for all that time, there’s been Candy Crush. Released in 2012, first on Facebook and soon after on phones, it was around during the boom years of mobile gaming, when it really seemed like the iPhone was going to be the new creative frontier for game developers everywhere, with every week bringing a new bite-sized gaming delight. It exploded around 2014, when it seemed to be on everyone’s phones and inspired hundreds of articles about how fun/addictive/evil it was. And it’s still here now, still one of the most popular and profitable games around.
Its Swedish manufacturer, King, was sold to Activision Blizzard in 2016 for $5.9 billion; last year, Microsoft bought the entire group of companies for $70 billion. By 2024, a staggering 200 million people will still be playing Candy Crush every month – double the number in 2014. Its total revenues amount to more than $20 billion.
How has it held up? It doesn’t seem like it’s changed over time. At first glance, Candy Crush is no different than it was 10 years ago. It’s still a free-to-play game where you swap colored candies to form lines of three that satisfy you and then they disappear and more appear in the level, and so on until you’re satisfied. Behind the scenes, though, a huge amount of improvements have been made to the game. as Candy Crush is now available. It’s still free to play, with only a small percentage of people paying for upgrades, more time or more levels, but it now also boosts that revenue with ads.
On a visit to King’s Stockholm offices — packed with pastel-colored gaming rooms, lounge spaces, and generously spaced dining areas, which seemed conspicuously empty in the wake of the pandemic — I learned that King has pivoted from a social mobile game developer to a behavioral science company. Those 200 million players create massive amounts of data about how people play and why, what makes them keep playing or close the app. That data is King’s most valuable asset. As at a social media company, the product itself is secondary.
One use of that data in 2024 is to train AI to develop new levels for King’s games Candy Crush and Farm Heroes — not instead of human designers, AI chief Luka Crnkovic-Friis insists, but alongside them. I’m shown how a human designer can put together a candy-matching level, then press a button to have the AI test it against models of player behavior to see if it’s too hard, too annoying, or too easy. This saves designers from testing levels with real players before iterating on them, which in turn saves a lot of time. King’s designers release 45 new levels every week. There are more than 17,000 in total, and many millions of dollars go into ensuring each one is as satisfying as possible.
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That data also tells King’s designers that many millions of players have been playing the game for years. “We pride ourselves on having a very high-quality game. That’s how we maintain our player base,” says Eva Ryott, Candy Crush’s gameplay director, who joined King as a data scientist in 2013. “They enjoy the game, and for many players, it becomes part of a daily habit. It’s part of taking a break, relaxing. A lot of people do it multiple times a day, some do it once a day. We’ve been listening to players’ needs and wants, making small tweaks and big additions. That combination has kept people in love with the game…we always want to be the highest-quality match-three game out there.”
Players aren’t held in for long by exploitation. One reason for Candy Crush’s longevity is that it doesn’t rely on pushy monetisation (“buy this virtual jacket before we take it away from you tomorrow!”) or the low-quality advertising that plagues mobile games in general. “The last thing we want to do is make players want to quit by annoying them,” says Trevor Burrows, head of Farm Heroes Saga. “Our goal is to draw people into the game and get them to stay, so misleading ads, for example, are not something we want to do. We design our games so that you don’t have to spend money, you don’t even have to watch ads – these are King’s principles, to create as little friction as possible.”
The game has been so optimized that people simply don’t want to stop playing Candy Crush. King attempted to create a sequel, Candy Crush Saga Soda, in 2014, but so many people kept playing the original that it became a companion game. It’s still going strong, about to celebrate its 10th anniversary, with its own player population and multi-million dollar revenue figures.
Paula Ingvar, director of Soda Saga, has a different take on why people still can’t stop playing Candy Crush: in a world full of constant demands, it just doesn’t take too much out of you. “My personal hypothesis is quite hard to prove, but I guess it’s part of your daily routine,” she says. “It doesn’t interfere or compete with anything else that’s important in your life. It fits into little moments of your day. And solving small problems is something uniquely interesting for human beings. It’s great to start the day by winning at something… The latest research we have on mental health indicates that if you achieve something small, you’re ready to tackle something bigger.”
Maybe the reason people play Candy Crush is the same reason they sit down to breakfast with a Sudoku or a crossword puzzle, the same reason people keep doing their daily Wordle. It’s a small win that sets you up for the day, a few minutes of frictionless fun. It won’t take over your life or empty your wallet. Unlike doomscrolling on social media apps, it doesn’t make you feel bad. It is, like its oldest customers, a long-term bet.
“I’ve seen a lot of mobile game strategies that rely on virality, squeeze players for what they’re worth, and after that, the game is over,” Ingvar says. “That’s never been the Candy Crush strategy. There will never be a difficulty wall or monetization pressure… We don’t have to stick to every turn the market takes. We have a very loyal player base and we can rely on their loyalty as long as we don’t make a mistake and give them a reason to leave.”
Keza MacDonald conducted these interviews at King’s offices in Stockholm. Travel expenses were covered by King.