King VP and head of live operations Eva Ryott spoke at GDC about the art and science of evergreen games. And shortly afterwards, we asked her more about running one of the biggest games in the world, Candy Crush Saga.
We also got a chance to ask about our reporting on last summer’s layoffs, if AI really is replacing staff and allegations of a toxic work culture for the first time.
Ryott touched upon the fierce competition Candy Crush Saga faces in the puzzle genre, too, with titles like Royal Match and Gossip Harbor trying to steal away King’s player base.
The below conversation has been edited for clarity, length and readability.
You spoke at GDC about running a evergreen game like Candy Crush Saga – is AI now a big part of that story?
The way I talked about it was looking into the past five years, and then into the future of live services and certainly we have a lot more complexity to manage today versus five years ago.
It doesn’t scale to manually manage the levels and improve them for the players. So I talked about how we use AI and automation to support the process of identifying levels that might be too difficult, too easily broken, and then fix them before we we put them out in front of all the players.
So essentially, how it makes us improve the level experiences sooner for players, and then at the same time it frees up capacity for our designers to do more creative and innovative work.
You’re probably aware of our report from last summer about AI and the layoffs that happened – are AI tools now running certain processes that humans were before?
No, it’s not accurate. The way we use AI, especially in the level management process, is as a supporting tool, right? So designers use it as a tool, and designers are very much still in the loop, because we need that oversight and we need the human creativity element as well.
So the way AI supports the workflows is that it can help us with the scale of 21,000 levels, and it can also help us test the new levels really quickly so that we can identify issues sooner and also fix them sooner through the AI.
So it is a supporting tool. We still very much believe in the combination of human creativity and these tools. It helps us get higher quality experiences out sooner to players – players will get levels that are at the right level of challenge, which is really important in a puzzle game. And at the same time, it frees up capacity to spend time on innovation, which is increasingly important for us.
But with 200 fewer staff are you not using AI processes and tools to make up some of the shortfall?
I can’t really talk about those details, because that’s essentially strategy and how to go about organising ourselves, which is not something that I can share.
I mean, obviously it’s always a tough moment for employees and us when we have to go through the layoffs, but it’s also something that, as a business, we need to stay relevant and stay competitive, and unfortunately, that means sometimes that we have to adjust the workforce to strategic needs.
We also published a couple of stories about King’s workplace culture last summer – do you have any thoughts on those allegations and have they made you think more deeply about how you run the company?
I’m personally proud of our company culture. I think we have a very supportive culture. We are really focused on collaborating. I love the fact that we really have cross-disciplinary teams that come together, and we have a very supportive environment.
So whenever I speak to people outside the company, I’m always telling them that’s also why I came back. I actually left the company to work for Meta, and I came back because of the culture.
I’ve been at the company for a long time, and this is something I think is quite unique, and we have maintained that culture over time. It’s very friendly, supportive, and I think King is a great company to work for. It’s a great workplace. We really support our employees.
The puzzle genre is getting more and more competitive with the likes of Royal Match and Gossip Harbor around – has that affected how you run Candy Crush Saga?
Yeah, I recognise it’s a more competitive market today versus 14 years ago when we launched. And I think it’s healthy, because it really helps us all to improve. The way we think about it is, we need to stay attuned to player expectations.
And one great example here is why we came about introducing the ‘two by two’ matching mechanic in Candy Crush – we didn’t have that until a year ago, which had become a match 3 market standard, and we realised that our players expect it nowadays because they play other match 3 games – this is what all the other games have. That was really through player insights and player research understanding.
So truly understanding how we put these bigger updates in the game is essential. And then I think the other part is that the rate of innovation is going up with us as well, right?
This is where I’m personally excited to be working on the technology part of live operations now, because technology can really enable us as well to keep up with the higher innovation rate.
