A lot of us were, at one point, in love with our smartphones. In the early days of Android and iPhone, apps seemed designed to delight; throw a few quid at the app store in 2010 and you could be playing some cute game, often involving birds, or messing around with a lightsaber within minutes. Social media apps designed for phones let us post artfully casual photos in a few taps, for our friends to drop hearts on. It was fun, once.
But over time, it’s become a toxic relationship. The fun got sucked out of everything. Social media morphed into a hellscape designed to ensnare and enrage us, providing just enough of our friends’ posts to prevent us from actually quitting the platform but prioritising their own ads and algorithmic videos. Twitter used to be jokes and cat memes and now it’s … well, it’s X, and I know I’m not the only one who’s deleted it off their phone entirely. The experience of using apps, phones and the internet more generally has significantly degraded – and the same can be said for mobile games, most of which now give you about 83 seconds of entertainment before trying to extort you for a £7.99 monthly subscription or showing you misleading ads that are so fascinatingly terrible you can’t look away.
And for all that time, there has been Candy Crush. Launched in 2012, first on Facebook and on phones quickly afterwards, it was there for the boom years of mobile gaming, when it genuinely looked like the iPhone was going to be the new creative frontier for game developers everywhere and each week brought a new bite-size gaming delight. It blew up 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 maker, King, was sold to Activision Blizzard in 2016 for $5.9bn; last year Microsoft bought that entire group of companies for $70bn. In 2024, a staggering 200 million people still play Candy Crush every month – twice as many as in 2014. Its lifetime revenue is more than $20bn.
How has it stuck around? Not by changing with the times, it seems. On the surface, absolutely nothing is different about Candy Crush than it was 10 years ago. It’s still a free game in which you swap colourful sweets around to make satisfying lines of three, and then they disappear, and more cascade into the level, and on you go until you have your fill. Behind the scenes, though, a tremendous amount of refinement has gone into how Candy Crush is made. It’s still free to play, with only a small percentage of people ever paying for power-ups, more time or more levels – but now it props up that revenue with ads, too.
On a visit to King’s Stockholm offices – full of candy-coloured recreation rooms, breakout spaces and generously apportioned canteens, which all felt conspicuously empty in the wake of the pandemic – I learned that King has morphed from a social mobile game developer into a behavioural science company. Those 200m players create vast troves of data on how people play and why, what makes them keep playing or close the app. That data is the most valuable thing about King. Like a social media company, the actual product is secondary.
One use for 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, insists head of AI Luka Crnkovic-Friis, but alongside them. I’m shown how a human designer can put a candy-matching level together, then press a button to have AI test it against player behaviour models to see if it’s too hard, too annoying, or too easy. This saves designers from testing levels on real players before iterating, which in turn saves a lot of time. King’s designers put out 45 new levels every week. There are more than 17,000 of them in total, and many millions of dollars are devoted to ensuring that each of them is optimally satisfying.
That data also tells King’s designers that many millions of players have been playing for years. “We take a lot of pride in having a really high-quality game. That’s how we keep our player base,” says Eva Ryott, Candy Crush’s head of gameplay, 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. Many people do that multiple times a day, some people once a day. We have been listening to players’ needs and desires, we’ve made small adjustments and big expansions. That combination has kept people in love with the game … we always want to be that highest-quality match-three game out there.”
You don’t retain players for that long by exploiting them. One reason for Candy Crush’s longevity is that it doesn’t go in for the high-pressure monetisation (“buy this virtual jacket before we take it away tomorrow!”) or low-quality advertising that plagues mobile games in general. “The last thing we’d want is to make players want to leave the game by annoying them,” says Trevor Burrows, who is in charge of Farm Heroes Saga. “Our goal is to get people into the game and get them to stay, so misleading ads, for instance, isn’t something we want to do. We design our games so you don’t have to spend money, you don’t even have to watch ads – these are King principles, to create the least friction possible.”
The game has become so optimised that people simply won’t move on from Candy Crush. King actually tried to create a sequel, Candy Crush Saga Soda, in 2014 – but so many people kept playing the original that it became a companion game instead. It’s still running, about to celebrate its tenth birthday, with its own distinct population of players and multi-billion revenue numbers.
Paula Ingvar, head of Soda Saga, has a different opinion about why people still can’t stop playing Candy Crush: in a world full of constant demands, it simply doesn’t ask very much of you. “My personal hypothesis, it’s quite difficult to prove, but my assumption is that it’s part of your daily routine,” she says. “It doesn’t interfere or compete with something else that’s important in your life. It fits into small pockets of your day. And solving small problems is a uniquely interesting thing to human beings. It’s great to start your day by winning at something … The latest research we have on mental health is that if you achieve something small, you’re ready to tackle something bigger.”
Perhaps the reason people play Candy Crush is the same people sit with a sudoku or crossword puzzle over breakfast – the reason people still do their daily Wordle. It’s a little win to set you up for the day, a few minutes of frictionless fun. It’s not going to 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 most longstanding customers, playing the long game.
“I’ve seen a lot of mobile game strategies rely on virality, squeeze players for whatever they’re worth, and after that, the game is over,” says Ingvar. “That’s never been Candy Crush’s strategy. You’ll never have a difficulty wall, or monetisation pressure … We don’t have to abide by every twist and turn that the market takes. We have a very loyal base of players. And we can rely on their loyalty as long as we don’t mess up and give them a reason to leave.”
Keza MacDonald conducted these interviews at King’s offices in Stockholm. Travel costs were covered by King.
