With over a trillion levels played, this sweet match 3 puzzle game is one of the most popular mobile games of all time! This article originally appeared on playing Candy Crush Saga today – a legendary puzzle game loved by millions of players around the world. This year will show if Candy Crush is up to the same feat. More hardcore free-to-play games on other platforms can last a very long time if game companies continue to support their online communities and supply new content.

Given how much King has milked out of Candy Crush already, the second scenario is especially interesting. To keep growth up and investors happy, King will need to either innovate on new titles more aggressively - increasing the chances of lightning striking twice - or continue to tweak its big games to further extend their staying power. Candy Crush was pretty similar to another PopCap hit, Bejeweled, but went farther on the back of its addictively calculated level design, social networking savvy gameplay and aggressive marketing strategy. That’s not to say innovation is the answer. King’s most recent title, Farm Heroes Saga, is basically the same game as Candy Crush Saga with different art, and Papa Pear Saga is pretty close to EA subsidiary PopCap’s seven-year-old puzzle game Peggle. The problem is, people like what they already know. In other words, its new content pipeline is dependent on a niche audience of gatekeepers. The games that do best get drafted to the big leagues, Facebook and mobile. Spread out over six studios, King’s developers first put new games on RoyalGames and then track who plays those games, for how long, and how often they come back. King uses the website as a farm for new ideas. The company advertises only three games on - Candy Crush Saga, Farm Heroes Saga and Papa Pear Saga - but it actually cranks out far more than that on a regular basis. The company said that its revenue dropped from $621 million in Q3 2013 to $602 million in Q4, “driven by a decrease in Candy Crush Saga gross bookings,” and that that drop would have been steeper had it not been “mostly offset by an increase in gross bookings across all of our other games.” Still, King’s most famous game generates some 78 percent of its revenue. Candy Crush Saga maker King is preparing to go public, but one look at the “key metrics” in its SEC papers tells a seemingly simple story: The company is popular and profitable, but may have already peaked.ĭue to the way King releases its products, though, “peaked” may not be the right word to use here.

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