Four years since Candy Crush King is still making the same game

<em>Farm Heroes Super Saga</em> hits app stores, but how long can the match-three boom last?

Read the whole story

 

[robert.walter]

Part of their early success seemed to come from manipulating ad networks with clickjacking and other shady practices.

Maybe 3 years ago, before Apple or others found a way to block it, CC and its ilk were popping up full screen ad spam regardless of ones attempts to avoid it. Either automatically, or upon attempts to dismiss the screen, one found themselves being hijacked to the App Store. (I saw Apple as complicit in this because it went in for much too long and seemed that there was no enforcement due to a vested interest in earning the 30% cut of CCS revenue.)

Later, after ad blocking was introduced, one saw even less of this crap. But a couple of days ago was using Speedtest on a friends phone (I paid to avoid ads on mine before it went to a subscription opt out model) and I nearly had PTSD flashbacks upon seeing the CCS full page ad pop open.

 

[robert.walter]

Tom West[/url]":19oi8v8z]The makers of Angry Birds, Zynga, and Candy Crush all have the same problem. They've essentially won the lottery. Sure, you need to have a well-designed and built game to start with (no denying them that), but after that, you then need the 1 in 10,000 chance that this just happened to be the thing that the consumers focused on to have it become the "it" game of it's time.

If there was a formula that guaranteed winning that lottery, then people would do so every time. But all they can do is buy a ticket by creating a decent game, and the cost of those tickets is greater than the expected return.

So, you have the builders faced with a truth too terrible to accept: They weren't the sole authors (or even the most significant element) of their success.

And in the end, they will lose almost every penny they made in their tremendous success rather than go with the logical path: keep the company small, put a few games out to capitalize on the name recognition while it's still profitable and understand that no matter what you do, your company is in a trajectory that inevitably leads it into the ground.

In other words, they won a lottery, not founded a long-term successful game company.

Before they were sold, or maybe just after being acquired, idk, I seem to remember one of their principals blathering about having a repeatable creative process. (Kinda like M. Night Shalyhan ((so?)) making the claim that he had an endlessly repeatable formula for making blockbuster movies.)