![]() "Candy Crush Saga fits really well on smartphones as well as tablets, and I think most of our players really appreciate that you can get these games for your smartphone too." "Bubble Witch Saga was a huge success on Facebook, and it was also popular on mobile, but not as big as it could be, and part of that was that it plays great on iPads with larger screens, but you kinda had to squint on smartphones," says Palm. ![]() He also suggests that Candy Crush Saga was a better experience on smartphones than King's previous game Bubble Witch Saga, which was another factor in its rise. You could say the same about a growing number of mobile games, but none of them are as big as Candy Crush Saga, so there's clearly something else going on here – even if it's just a perfect storm of luck and fortuitous timing akin to the one that fuelled Angry Birds' sharp rise in early 2010. The game is free to play, of course, and there is the social aspect of seeing how your friends are doing." "Then of course there is the accessibility of the entire game: it's a cross-platform game you can play on computer then continue from your smartphone and you tablet. "The theme is very good, everybody can relate to the candy pieces: it's very positive and makes for very colourful and nice shapes," he says. Why, then, has Candy Crush Saga become so big? Palm doesn't have a big secret to reveal, perhaps unsurprisingly. Tommy Palm says PC, iOS and Android remain King's focus for now Based on the latest 100m DAUs figure, that lead has since stretched considerably: in the second quarter of this year, Zynga reported 39m DAUs. In April, King also claimed that it had overtaken Zynga, the reigning giant of social gaming, for DAUs of its games. The company now claims 100m daily active users (DAUs) across all its web and mobile games – the latter include Bubble Witch Saga and Pet Rescue Saga, with Papa Pear Saga following soon. King has made the most of the game's success. Whatever the number, app store top-grossing charts show it's one of the three most lucrative mobile games in the world right now – alongside Puzzle & Dragons and Clash of Clans – and has been since shortly after its iOS release in November 2012. ![]() Palm declines to give an active-users figure, but analytics site AppData claims that the game currently has 132.4m unique monthly players across web and mobile – a figure that only includes people who've connected the game to Facebook.Įstimates vary on how much money Candy Crush Saga is making: Le Parisien recently claimed the game's daily revenues were €470k (around $623k), while ThinkGaming pegs them at $850k. Candy Crush Saga is currently being played 700m times a day on mobile devices alone. So far, that's been a great strategy for us." And we do not differentiate between people who pay and people who don't: we just see them as players, and optimise in making sure the game is really fun. "We focus internally a lot on the player experience, making sure it's really fun to play. It's designed so you can complete the game," says Tommy Palm, whose official job title is "Games Guru" at King, although his role is more akin to a head of global studios for the social and mobile games publisher. "70% of the people on the last level haven't paid anything. As a journalist, though, I feel like defending the game against its fiercer critics, who seem to think its players are incapable of making similar decisions. It's gaming snobbery of the worst kind, and not because Candy Crush doesn't sometimes feel over-aggressive in the way its difficulty curve nudges players towards in-app purchases – it sometimes does – but because it's based on a view of casual gamers as little more than lab rats, tapping buy-buttons when commanded rather than seeking "proper" games elsewhere.Īs a player, I ducked out of Candy Crush Saga when I hit my personal ceiling of fun versus payment.
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