In April 2012, the world was introduced to Candy Crush. On one hand, the game’s structures itself meant that Candy Crush was hardly original. Titles like Bejewelled and Bust-A-Move offered similar mechanics in the early 2000s and 1990s. Going further back, games like Columns (1990) also clearly had an influence on Candy Crush, which was developed by King.
Yet, to say that Candy Crush was just another game is wide off the mark. Its influence is massive, and it set all sorts of records. It almost single-handedly built the King brand, allowing the developer to later be taken over by Activision Blizzard for a cool $5.8 billion. It inspired other developers to create numerous games like Candy Crush across different gaming and entertainment genres. In short, Candy Crush was much more than a viral game.
That said, the fact it went viral led to some incredible statistics for Candy Crush:
- By the end of its first year, it had over 500 million downloads. By 2020, the game had been downloaded over 2.7 billion times – equivalent to around a third of the population of the planet.
- At its peak, the game had over 93 million MAUs (daily active players) – around the same number as the populations of Germany and Portugal combined.
- In 2013, Candy Crush Saga was the highest-grossing app on the Apple App Store. It reportedly earned over $1.5 billion in 2014 alone. Even as its popularity waned toward the end of the 2010s, it was still earning around $1 billion per year.
Let’s first ask what some of the conditions were that caused Candy Crush to become so popular. As we said, the game wasn’t exactly ground-breaking in terms of mechanics, as the “match 3” mechanic had been around for decades. The game was “sticky,” however, and had the kind of endorphin-laden catchiness that made it ripe for going viral.
The Nascent Smartphone Boom Needed A Central Game
Yet, there were other external factors that helped it gain extreme popularity. For a start, we were at the beginning of the iPhone boom. Candy Crush could not have existed five years previously. The fact all of us had a smartphone in our pocket meant a viral game was ripe to take over. The iPhone needed a casual game to become the title du jour on the device, and Candy Crush was the perfect candidate.
Alongside the smartphone boom, we had the ubiquitousness of social media. It should not be understated how that generational shift came from going online with a purpose to going online simply for the sake of being online. Candy Crush was there to divert from the ennui of the online scroller. Of course, that social media link was underlined by Candy Crush’s integration with Facebook in 2016, offering the game to around 1 billion Facebook users.
Freemium Model Changed The Casual Gaming Sector
We cannot overlook the game’s influence on the freemium gaming model. Again, Candy Crush did not invent the concept, but we might say it perfected it.
From Gold Bars and Extra Lives to Power-Ups and Extra Moves, it found ways to make players pay for something they initially believed to be free. However, we must again point to fortuitous external circumstances: Candy Crush came around at a time of the mobile pay revolution when many of us became accustomed to making micro-purchases online.
Candy Crush is still going strong in 2024. It might be considered a little uncool to Gen-Z – the type of game your grandma might play on Facebook. Yet, it deserves its place in the pantheon of all-time classics. Like its fellow classics – Pac-Man, Tetris, – it will still be getting played years after its initial release. It caught the zeitgeist of the early 2010s, but its massive influence means it’s still relevant today.
