Here are some more quick-fire highlights from GDC 2025, featuring King, Blizzard, Supercell and more King.
‘Half of Diablo Immortal players have never played Diablo’
Speaking during a panel which also brought us some detail on Call of Duty: Mobile’s launch, Diablo Immortal executive producer Peiwen Yao described the process of launching the mobile edition of Blizzard’s dungeon crawler back in June 2022.
Internal numbers suggest half of Diablo Immortal players have never played a Diablo game before, according to Yao. That meant the Blizzard/NetEase collab had hit its goal of reaching new players – and lots of them.
Yao said the Diablo Immortal team was “shocked” by the downloads the game saw at launch, crediting the power of the Diablo brand. (Appmagic data says the game generated over 9m installs in June 2022, and over 6m the following month.)
Development partner NetEase was credited with the strength of the game’s live ops. From day one, the game saw biweekly updates, and major updates every quarter – a much faster cadence that many at Blizzard were used to.
Yao also credits the game’s social, MMO-like features for its continued high engagement, as well as large year-long story arcs for dedicated players.
Candy Crush is in its “franchise phase”
In the same talk, King’s Candy Crush Saga general manager Paula Ingvar said that when the original game launched on mobile, its budget for the year was made back in a month or two.
King also believed that Candy Crush Saga would not last, and Soda Saga was conceived as the game that would eventually replace the first title – but both games have kept on performing well.
Ingvar said Candy Crush is in the ‘franchise phase’ of its development with the addition of Solitaire, which seemed to suggest there are more new Candy-themed takes on other puzzle genres incoming. She added that her team is also working on some “unexpected crossovers” coming down the line.
What happened when Supercell added competition into Hay Day
Supercell design lead Camilla Avellar talked through the launch and consequences of Hay Day’s Derby feature in a ‘game designer’s notebook’ session.
The Derby is effectively Hay Day’s version of a clan leaderboard, and was inspired by Clash of Clans’ Clan Wars. Introduced in March 2015 – almost exactly ten years ago – it’s a weekly quest system that combines the progress of players in each ‘neighbourhood’ (or clan) and has them compete. It was a success, pushing up overall play time and monetisation in the short term.
But it also effectively ‘burned out’ lots of players who initially loved the extra competition of the Derby, but became disillusioned with the added edge that comes with competition.
Avellar concluded that the Derby feature split the audience into those who enjoy competition and those who don’t, with the latter group much larger – a mistake, in Avellar’s eyes.
Later in the Q&A session afterwards, Avellar said the team has since tilted the balance of the Derby feature back towards player collaboration, rather than competition, and has seen better results.
Why Candy Crush Solitaire is like carrot cake
In a talk about launching Candy Crush Solitaire, King executive producer Marta Cortinas likened the game to carrot cake, due to its slightly unexpected set of ingredients.
Indeed, Cortinas said that King had tested several different iterations of Candy Crush Solitaire, and found that few of them resonated.
“[players] told us not to make this game”, she said. “[they said] this doesn’t make sense.”
But King was determined to expand its player network and tap into a new player base, so it kept going.
Solitaire games are more serious, engaging and challenging titles compared to a match 3 like Candy Crush, said Cortinas, and in early testing, Candy Solitaire had a very strong Candy theme.
The bright and colourful game boards and very prominent Candy characters became jarring – so the Candy look and feel was dialled back.
That also meant cutting power-ups familiar to Candy players from Solitaire, as their form and function did not fit into the game’s mechanics.
Cortings added that Candy Crush Solitaire is still in a “launch and learn phase”, suggesting the game will undergo many more tweaks as it builds its audience.
Is Candy Crush the “biggest esport in the world”…?
In yet another GDC talk from King, marketing activations senior manager Margaux Diaz and senior director of product marketing Roberto Kusabbi talked through a recent player tournament that attracted 15m players – causing the duo to cheekily claim that it meant Candy Crush Saga is “the biggest esport in the world”
There were a couple of other stats in here: the average Candy Crush Saga player racks up 4.3 hours of playtime a week, and total play sessions per player per week is 28, on average.
