Just over six years ago, Swedish game developer King released a Facebook game based on an deceptively simple premise. Players would shuffle around brightly-coloured candies to make them disappear from the game board – a subtle riff on the kind of tile-matching games that dated back at least as far as the Russian puzzle game Shariki, originally built for MS-DOS in 1994.
“We thought the games would last for six months when we launched the first ones, and we had a plan to do more games because we thought they couldn't last longer than that,” says King co-founder and chief creative officer Sebastian Knutsson. Little did he know.
Candy Crush has proven to have far more sticking power than any tile-matching game that went before. Seven months after its Facebook launch, Candy Crush Saga was released on mobile, and quickly became the most downloaded mobile game on the App Store.
In the almost six years since then, the app has only spent eight weeks outside the top 50 games in the US by daily downloads on iOS. Ranked by daily consumer spend, the app has stayed in the top five per cent of games on iOS a whopping 96 per cent of the time according to data from App Annie. In terms of all-time spend on iOS it is second only to Clash of Clans, the 2013 strategy game from Finnish developer Supercell.
In an industry in which developers are rushing to produce the next hit as soon as their last game is released, Candy Crush has proven to be particularly sticky. Out of the 270 million people who play King games each month – including Bubble Witch Saga and Farm Heroes Saga, the original Candy Crush is still the firm's biggest draw. At King’s office in central Stockholm, there are more employees working on updating the six-year-old game than there are on either of its two follow-ups: Candy Crush Soda Saga and Candy Crush Jelly Saga.
So why, then, has King decided on now to launch its biggest update to the Candy Crush series yet? Launched worldwide on October 11, Candy Crush Friends is – like the other updates before it – a variation on a theme rather than a complete overhaul of the game. The core mechanic of the game is unchanged. The switching is still there. So are the explosions, sound effects and candy store graphics, although these are all “dialled to 11” notes the lead game designer on Friends, Jeremy Kang.
What’s changed are the bits around the game – the world map, which is now 3D, and the characters, which now play a much more central role in the game. Knutsson and his employees call these elements the meta-game. “Let’s not tamper with the core,” Knutsson says. “We don't want more complexity on the most downloaded game on Earth, I'd rather make it more accessible.”
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Part of the reason for the new focus on characters is that it gives players another reason to pick up the game. In Friends players will be able to unlock new outfits for characters, with the release of bonus content timed around real world holidays and celebrations such as Halloween and Christmas. Characters will also guide players through the game, and each one has a power-up to help crack specific levels. There are also a handful of new game modes that will see players free octopuses, dunk cookies and match hearts to complete levels.
Although these might seem like fairly minor tweaks, for Knutsson, the characters are key to keeping Candy Crush alive for the long run. “This is really a franchise that we want to invest in for the next 20 to 30 years,” he says. “Trying to make those characters your friends and be part of that game experience has been a core principle for how we try to push the game forward.”
Knutsson’s long-term vision may seem a touch hyperbolic, but dotted around the King office are posters that underline the longevity that the developer envisages for Candy Crush. “Candy 2022: trust in toffee,” they say, alluding towards a ten-year anniversary party that is still four years off. On another noticeboard there’s a riff on the much-mimicked Barack Obama election poster by Shephard Fairey. “Yes we candy,” is written underneath the instantly-recognisable red and blue of the poster.
And maybe this 30-year-plan isn’t quite so outlandish. Candy Crush Saga has already demonstrated the kind of longevity that’s deeply unusual among mobile games. Of the 20-or-so games King has released in the last seven years, Candy Crush has been the company’s sole runaway success. “It's still the key game for us, Candy Crush, and the original one is still the one that's charting the highest,” Knutsson says.
A lot this is down to the fact that even the original Candy Crush isn’t the same game it was six years ago. On its mobile launch, the game originally had just 125 levels. The company is now heading towards level 3,500. “We’re always focussed on how we engage and retain the players,” Knutsson says. “It’s more about engaging a big audience and keeping them for the long haul.”
This means constantly tweaking the game in response to how it’s being played. Most of the time, King catches dud levels – ones which are too hard or easy, or introduce a mechanic without properly explaining it – before they even get to the release, but occasionally they’ll have to go in and tweak a level in the game itself. “Data doesn't tell you what would be great to do, but it tells you if you've designed something that's broken,” Knutsson says. The company looks at specific metrics, such as the percentage of people who fail a level on the first try, to decide whether or not to alter or remove a level. (Knutsson won’t reveal what that cutoff point is, however).
This is the key to Candy Crush’s success. Inside King they call it dual-tracking – updating older games with new levels and content while releasing new ones at the same time. There are a few reasons for this approach. One is that are a number of Candy Crush super fans who will readily download every new game, such is their appetite for new candies to swipe. Newer players, particularly those in countries such as India where smartphone penetration is rapidly rising, might join the franchise at the latest game in which case it makes sense to hit people with the most sophisticated Candy Crush experience possible.
And then there’s the other part of the game. Getting users to pay. In late 2015, the US games giant Activision Blizzard bought King for $5.9 billion (£3.8bn), a decision that seemed to be partly predicated on King’s ability to induce mobile gamers to part with their cash in exchange for extra in-game lives or bonuses. For Knutsson, the best way to get players to pay is simply to create a game that people like to come back to again and again. “You can't do it by tricking them, because that doesn't last long. You can't do it by luring them to pay when they're not intending to, because you're burning the confidence,” he says.
Elsewhere in the tech industry, the idea of designing a deliberately sticky app is starting to leave a bitter taste in the mouth. As the “time well spent” movement gains traction among self-proclaimed Silicon Valley ethicists, app makers have responded by making an outward effort to help people spend less time on their platforms. In August, Facebook launched a new feature that let people track how much time they were spending on the social media site. In the latest version of iOS, Apple included a screen time function that helps users monitor their time across apps.
For Knutsson, Candy Crush doesn’t fall into the time-suck category. King keeps level times short, around three minutes or less, to make it easier for people to pick up the game for short amounts of time and then turn it off just as easily. “It's more a dip-in, dip-out play that fits our audience and their way of playing, and not having to commit to two hours just to get the mastery,” he says. The life system, which automatically locks players out of the game after they lose five lives (unless they pay), also forces players to take a break from the game, Knutsson says.
But what about that 30-year-plan? At the moment, Candy Crush is very much tied to our mobiles, but Knutsson says that expanding the game’s meta-game is the first step to it leaping off into new formats in the future. “It gives us more options, whether we're doing more gaming platforms or even if we switch to other media at a point,” Knutsson says. And if – as some predict – our current obsession with screens is eventually replaced by wearables or voice-activated devices? “If there's a new platform coming, we for sure want to be there and want it to have Candy.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
