How Candy Crush’s designers connect games to marketing
It’s often the simplest games that stand the test of time.
Look at the examples of Solitaire, Super Mario, or Tetris. All of them have been around since the early ’80s and employ rules that are easy to grasp without ever over-complicating themselves.
Players can use them as gap-fillers on an otherwise busy day: on the sofa in between Zoom calls, during a stressful commute to work, or unwinding after a controlled meeting with relatives and friends.
You enjoy it, but you are thinking in the moment.
Candy Crush and SuperOne are the same. Candy Crush is a variant of Tetris. Initially released for Facebook in 2012, game designer King launched its pattern-finding in versions for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 10 in quick succession due to its popularity.
If you told the estimated 272 million current users of Candy Crush that they would have to pay to download the game’s app, the numbers would not be nearly so high. So how does it make money? Candy Crush initially found advertisements were the major source of revenue.
However, in 2013 King steered away from this and now solely earns money from the game in the form of in-app purchases (IAPs). Despite reports that only around 4% of users purchased these in-game items, crucially, it led to millions of dollars in monthly revenue for King.
Sensor Tower reports that the Candy Crush series of mobile games collectively made more than $1.5 billion in revenue from microtransactions in 2018 across iOS and Android. That works out to a staggering $4.2 million on average spent every day.
SuperOne is new. It relies on the same principle of simplicity but is not tied to a single idea of gameplay. Using images as the safest method of firing dopamine into players’ brains, creates the excitement of matching pairs of images — but across an infinite variety of categories.
SuperOne using blockchain and cryptocurrency standards — and creating controlled and branded environments that advertisers can only adore — it uses all of the tricks of Candy Crush. But it does it better.
IAPs are a great model for both consumers and developers. As consumers, we get free games that they can choose to pay for. Developers have a revenue stream that’s gaining momentum. But there is a growing concern that an increasing number of developers are beginning to exploit consumers by first getting them hooked, then making them pay to carry on.
SuperOne has the backing of the most dynamic marketing network in the world. Combine this with a gameplay that is so simple — so revolutionary in fact — that it doesn’t need to rely on tricks to make money.
Humans hate leaving goals incomplete, which is why we complete reading books we don’t enjoy. We spend huge amounts of time playing games just so that we can complete them. Completing those games gives us a sense of mastery.
Candy Crush rewards you with goals, so you feel good about yourself. The designers of these games, though, create ‘moving goals’ so that just when you reach one, there’s another. SuperOne does not need to move goals halfway. It’s the perfect game, backed by the perfect business networking model.