This is common within gaming but the sheer scale at which King operates for Candy Crush Saga – the game commands over 200 million monthly active users – sets it apart from the competition. As King’s senior vice president, Alex Dale, told a 2019 UK commons committee investigating gaming addiction, the company gathers vast amounts of data on how its players interact with the game, applying such findings to its design. Put simply, King’s iterative, player-centric approach to design is a big reason why the treat-smashing game still feels so good. Rather than viewing Candy Crush Saga as habit-forming, Green is committed to giving players a “bite-sized experience that’s fun.” He says one of the ways this is achieved is by paying “a lot of attention to how players respond to the experience.” “On a daily basis, it's a tiny proportion of people who spend any money,” he says. It's more like, ‘What do you do with it?’ Ten years ago, the chat was, ‘We know one per cent of players are going to pay money for this: How much do we get out of them?’ A lot of the time, the answer was that they were trying to get tens of thousands out of them.”Īs you might expect from the leader of a team whose game is celebrating its ten-year anniversary, Green is reluctant to engage directly with such criticisms. “When Pokémon comes out next week, it will be addictive. “Games in general have been built to be addictive because a lot of the focus now is on retaining users,” he says. It’s not Candy Crush Saga’s “ habit-forming” gameplay that Mike Rose, former senior editor at Game Developer and founder of publisher No More Robots, takes issue with, but the way it’s paired with this free-to-play monetisation strategy. In 2015, for example, King raked in $2 billion in revenue across all of its games, all of that money coming from only two per cent of its total players. Exasperated, you're more likely to splurge a couple of quid on hearts to plug yourself back into its “ machine zone.” While it’s the case that most people don’t overspend, a small percentage, known within the industry as “ whales,” are what have traditionally made these kinds of games financially viable, and, in a case like Candy Crush Saga, monstrously lucrative. At this moment, you’ll probably use up all five of your allotted lives. Like an '80s Pac-Man arcade machine, the game profits from the idea of “one more turn.” It lulls you into a trance with a run of easy levels before delivering one of nightmarish difficulty. Hon is alluding to Candy Crush Saga’s secret sauce, both the reason King was snapped up by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion in 2016 and why it has faced criticism over its ethics.
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