With King Digital Entertainment, the makers of Candy Crush, preparing to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, we pay tribute to the game’s addicts – and their friends who are sick and tired of receiving invites!
When London-headquartered King turned its Candy Crush browser game into Candy Crush Saga for Facebook and mobile, gamers who got a taste for the match-three puzzler kept coming back for more. The game secured more than 10m downloads in December 2012 alone and eventually overtook FarmVille 2 as the most popular game on Facebook, a position it still holds with more than 62m likes on the app page.
In all, the game has been installed more than 500m times across Facebook and iOS and Android devices, and it seems that sweet-toothed gamers just can’t get enough.
It has now emerged that King has submitted an IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US, with the company valued as highly as US$500m. Not bad for a game that is, essentially, a more flavourful version of the classic Bejeweled.
Despite King’s high expectations, detractors say it won’t be long until the Candy Crush bubble bursts (à la FarmVille), though the company is said to have a number of other titles in the works. I wonder, will these next games prove as addictive as its big hit?
