Candy Crush Saga’s latest music-themed season reactivated nearly 1m players, says King marketing VP Luken Aragon.
For its latest musical collaboration, the firm worked with artists Kimbra, Tokimonsta and Łaszewo to create Candy Crush-themed songs, as well as running in-game tournaments.
“We saw a significant uplift in our installs in the US during the tournament and reactivated nearly one million players globally,” VP of marketing for Candy Crush Saga at King Luken Aragon told us.
“We have been experimenting in this space for a while now, launching a number of successful partnerships with artists like the Jonas Brothers.”
That Jonas Brothers collab saw several new tracks debut in Candy Crush ahead of their mainstream launch, and King says its associated content hub received more than 9.2m visits. The band’s main menu takeover received 923m views and over 59m players entered the Jonas Brothers leaderboard, says King.
“There is constant competition nowadays for people’s attention whether that’s in gaming or across other entertainment platforms, everyone is competing for consumers’ time, so it’s important we continue to challenge ourselves,” Aragon continues.
“This means we’re always looking at new ways to evolve both our in-game activations but also our marketing campaigns and out-of-game experiences. LiveOps, partnerships and collaborations provide really interesting platforms to drive differentiation and push that creativity further, so we’ll continue to explore opportunities in this space moving forward.”
Appmagic estimates that Candy Crush Saga makes King around $90m per month through IAPs. That translates as around $2.5m-$2.8m on a typical weekday, rising to $3-3.3m on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. These estimates do not include ad revenue.
Cut another way, Candy Crush Saga earned King just over $1bn from IAP in 2023, up from $956m in 2022. It has earned ~$872m to date in 2024, so could top 2023s best-ever performance if current trends continue through to the end of 2024.
