Candy Crushing It

With an estimated 144m daily active users on its Facebook app, and over 1.4 billion daily plays, British developer King.com is one of gaming’s biggest success stories. How has it succeeded so spectacularly when other high-profile competitors are struggling? According to 46-year-old CEO Riccardo Zacconi the answer is threefold.

“Social, mobile and microtransactions,” he says, explaining the coincidence of market factors that helped King become one of the hottest games developers in the world. “When we started in 2003, casual gaming was already there. It was always a very broad interest industry. The key change now is that I can play these games anywhere rather than having to play on a computer.”

His relaxed, long-view approach is at odds with the popular perception of King as an overnight success story, propelled by the phenomenally popular Candy Crush Saga. “It took us 10 years,” laughs Zacconi. “We launched nearly 200 casual games on King.com. After you launch that many games you know what works and what doesn’t.”

King shifted gear in April 2012, when it ported Candy Crush over to Facebook, tapping into a potential audience – at that time – of just under a billion people. “There are two aspects behind why Facebook is core. The first one is the user experience on Facebook and the second one is the marketing,” says Zacconi.

“On the web you need to ask every person to enter their email address, to choose a password, then you have to do the same with friends. On Facebook it is one click to approve the transaction.” He also cites the ability to promote King’s games to Facebook users based on their likelihood to play: “To be able to target new players based on demographic, on whether they like games, their age, gender and country is extremely valuable. I can also identify players who have played our games versus people who have not played the games.”

The combination of social, mobile and microtransactions means that a staggering 225 million gamers now play King’s titles every month. Candy Crush Saga, Pet Rescue Sagaand Farm Heroes Saga make up three of the top five games on Facebook. But in an industry that has seen several one, two and three-hit wonders, does the monolithic success of Candy Crush pose a challenge to King?

“Is the games industry hit driven? Yes, no doubt,” says Zacconi. “If you look at companies that have been around for longer, such as Electronic Arts or Activision, they have several titles that are quite successful. But in the last 12 months, we developed five of the top 10 games on Facebook. We want every game to be industry leading, better than the games you find anywhere else. We want to say to our users, ‘You like Candy, now try Pet Rescueor Farm Heroes or Papa Pear’. In this way we build a network of games where we can say the player enjoys playing ‘King’ games. We are not discounting the chance that we will have another mega hit like Candy, but we don’t need to have another megahit.”

Not only is Zacconi relaxed about the possibility of repeating Candy Crush’s success, he believes that trying to revisit the past makes bad business sense: “One thing is for certain, if we do the things we do today in three years time, we will not be here. So we continuously need to innovate, to push the envelope, to experiment – and that’s exactly what we are doing.