a Many of us were once obsessed with our smartphones. In the early days of Android and iPhone, apps seemed designed to entertain us. In 2010, you could shell out a few pounds on the App Store and within minutes be playing a cutesy bird game or frolicking with a lightsaber. Social media apps designed for phones let you post artsy, casual photos and send hearts to your friends in just a few taps. That used to be fun.

But over time, it became a toxic relationship. The fun was taken out of it all. Social media turned into a hellish place designed to trap and anger us. just My friends are posting too much, and rather than actually quitting the platform, I’m prioritizing Twitter ads and algorithmic videos. Twitter used to be full of jokes and cat memes, but now it’s… well, X. I know I’m not the only one who has completely deleted Twitter from my phone. My experience of using apps, my phone, and the internet in general has deteriorated significantly. The same can be said for mobile games. Now most games provide me with around 83 seconds of entertainment before forcing me to pay a £7.99 monthly subscription fee or showing me nasty, misleading ads that I can’t look away from.

And all that time, Candy Crush has been around. Released first on Facebook in 2012 and on mobile phones soon after, the game existed during a booming era of mobile gaming, when the iPhone was becoming the new creative frontier for game developers around the world, bringing new bite-sized chunks of gaming joy every week. It exploded in popularity around 2014, when it seemed like everyone was playing it on their phone, and hundreds of articles were written about how fun, addictive, and bad it was. And it’s still around, and it’s one of the most popular and profitable games of all time.

Swedish manufacturer King was sold to Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion in 2016, and Microsoft acquired the entire group for $70 billion last year. In 2024, a staggering 200 million people will still be playing Candy Crush every month, double the number in 2014. The game’s cumulative revenue exceeds $20 billion.

How has Candy Crush survived? It’s not because it has changed with the times. On the surface, Candy Crush is exactly the same as it was 10 years ago: a free-to-play game where you swap colorful candies to make satisfying lines of three, then the candies disappear and more candies flow into the level until you’re satisfied. But behind the scenes, Candy Crush has undergone a huge improvement. how Candy Crush is done. It’s still free to play, and while only a small percentage of people pay for power-ups, extra time, and levels, it’s now also supported by advertising.

During a visit to King’s Stockholm offices, full of candy-colored recreation rooms, breakout spaces and ample dining options, it all felt eerily empty because of the pandemic, I learned that King has transformed itself from a social mobile-game developer into a behavioral-science company. Its 200 million players generate a ton of data about how and why people play, what makes them keep playing or close the app. That data is King’s most valuable asset; as with any social-media company, the actual product is secondary.

One way to leverage that data in 2024 is to train AI to develop new levels for King’s games, Candy Crush and Farm Heroes. AI head Luka Crnkovic-Friis argues that it should be developed alongside human designers, not instead of them. He explained how a human designer can create a candy-matching level and then press a button to have the AI ​​test it against a model of player behavior to see if it’s too hard, too tedious or too easy. This saves designers a ton of time by not having to test levels with real players before iterating. King’s designers publish 45 new levels every week, totaling more than 17,000, with millions of dollars spent to ensure each one is optimally satisfying.

The data also tells King’s designers that millions of players have been playing for years. “We take great pride in having a really high-quality game. That’s how we retain our player base,” says Eva Lyot, head of gameplay for Candy Crush, who joined King as a data scientist in 2013. “They enjoy the game, and for many of our players it’s part of their daily routine. It’s part of their rest and relaxation. Many play multiple times a day, some once a day. We’ve been listening to our players’ needs and wants, making small tweaks and big expansions. That combination keeps people hooked on the game. We want to always be the best quality match-3 game.”

Squeezing players won’t keep them around for very long. One of the reasons Candy Crush has lasted so long is that it doesn’t use the high-pressure monetization (“Buy this virtual jacket before it’s taken away tomorrow!”) or low-quality ads that are so prevalent in mobile games in general. “We definitely don’t want to frustrate players and make them want to quit,” says Trevor Burrows, head of Farm Heroes Saga. “Our goal is to get people into the game and keep them there, so we want to avoid misleading ads, for example. We design our games so that you don’t even need to spend money or watch an ad. It’s the King principle of as little friction as possible.”

The game is so over-optimized that people just can’t get enough of it. In fact, King tried to make a sequel, Candy Crush Saga Soda, in 2014, but too many people kept playing the original, so it became a companion game instead. The game is still running today, boasting its own player base and billions of dollars in revenue, and will soon be celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Paula Engvall, head of Soda Saga, has a different opinion on why people can’t stop playing Candy Crush: in a world full of constant demands, Candy Crush simply doesn’t demand as much. “My personal hypothesis, which is pretty hard to prove, is that Candy Crush is part of our daily routine,” she says. “It doesn’t interfere with or compete with anything else that’s important in life. It fits into a little bit of time in the day. And solving small problems is something uniquely interesting for humans. It’s nice to start the day by winning something… The latest research on mental health suggests that achieving small things prepares you to tackle bigger things.”

Maybe people play Candy Crush for the same reasons people do Sudoku or crossword puzzles at breakfast, the same reasons people still play Wardle every day: It’s a little win that gets you set for the day, a few minutes of stress-free fun. It doesn’t take over your life or empty your wallet. Unlike doom-scrolling on a social media app, it doesn’t put you in a bad mood. It’s playing the long game, just like its most longtime customers.

“We’ve seen a lot of mobile game strategies rely on virality, squeezing as much as we can out of players, and then it’s game over,” says Ingvar. “That’s not the strategy with Candy Crush. There’s never been a difficulty barrier or pressure to monetize. We don’t have to follow every twist and turn of the market. We have a very loyal player base, and we can count on their loyalty as long as we don’t screw up and give them a reason to leave.”

Keza MacDonald conducted these interviews in King’s offices in Stockholm, with travel expenses covered by King.