A year after the "Candy Crush Saga" hit the mobile market, its creator King.com Ltd., revealed sweet statistics. The phenomenal game has been downloaded over 500 million times this year, surpassing Farmville and catching up with Angry Birds that has posted a billion downloads. Roughly 150 billion individual games have been initiated and one in every 23 users of Facebook is a fan of the game.
King first launched "Candy Crush" on its website and then to the Facebook platform in April 2012. The addictive "fremium" game hit the mobile market November 2012.
"The past year has been one of the most exciting times for King since "Candy Crush Saga" launched on mobile. The incredible milestone of more than half a billion downloads of the game, as well as the continued enthusiasm from our community, really delights the entire King team. Fans can look forward to even more exciting new "Candy Crush Saga" content over the coming months, including an exciting new twist to the game," said King's Tommy Palm.
The company also revealed that about 61 percent of the game's players in the UK tinker with their gadgets and conquer challenging stages of the game while on public transport. About 78 percent of its players in the U.S. find the time to match and switch the sweets in the game while watching TV.
"At its core, the success of Candy Crush relies on game mechanics that work universally - it's very casual and easy to get into, while at the same time you don't get tired of it; it's something that you can play over and over again, and it's meaningful for a long time," explained Palm in an interview.
"The fact that you can access it on lots of different devices and continue your adventure from another platform is very important, and then there's the social aspect - games have traditionally always been social, but with recent technology updates it's much more acceptable to people to have their friends within a game and see who else is playing it,' he added.
"Candy Crush Saga" had 30 stages three years ago but now has 544 levels and its maker guarantees that there will always be more levels. One of the most challenging one and considered as one of the most notorious is Level 65. The game makes money by encouraging in-app purchases.
The game taps into the child in every mobile user and fan of the game. In an interview with Time, the maker shared some of the game's secret for success.
"Many people have had a very positive feeling about candy since they were kids. And it makes for a really nice visual game board with a lot of color and interesting shapes," Palm explained.
King is expected to have its initial public offering on Nasdaq soon with the company said to be valued at $5 billion. Other social media game creators such as Zynga also went public but has since then declined in terms of popularity and earnings.
