Candy Crush Saga - H 2014
There’s a new Candy Crush Saga offering on App Store shelves, but can the spinoff mobile game replicate the original addictive app’s success?
King Digital Entertainment’s latest release, Candy Crush Soda Saga, has launched in certain markets and is gearing up for a global launch in the fall, reports The Wall Street Journal.
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“With Candy Crush, we took the best bits of several match-three games and combined them into something much stronger. … All that incremental innovation created an almost perfect game, which we didn’t really understand when we started off,” said King co-founder and creative chief Sebastian Knutsson of matching the original app’s appeal with improved graphics and new in-app purchases.
While the spinoff is predicted to take from the first Candy Crush‘s revenue, their combined profits will hopefully be higher than what the initial Candy Crush Saga collects alone. “We have really tried to fine-tune the game we have and add new approaches,” he continued.
Knutsson explained to The Wall Street Journal that before launching Candy Crush, the company would always “ensure our development process is repeatable. We were asking ourselves how we could ‘productify’ the game-making process, and it comes down to lowering the risk of failure.” Their relatively quick game-creation process includes testing two simple titles per month on RoyalGames.com, created by three-person development teams within a three-week period; expanding concepts of popular launches with larger teams; and introducing the resulting, evolved titles to Facebook and mobile platforms, free of charge and full of in-app purchases.
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The original Candy Crush app contributed about 80 percent of King’s gross revenues last year and remains one of the world’s highest-grossing mobile games. The company set its initial public offering at $22.50 in March, but its stock plunged 16 percent to $19 on its first day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Email: Ashley.Lee@THR.com
Twitter: @cashleelee
