The launch of Candy Crush Solitaire could signal a subtle change in direction for King, judging by our conversation with Candy Crush Saga GM Paula Ingvar.
As we’ve reported previously, Ingvar said at GDC that with the addition of Solitaire, Candy Crush is in the ‘franchise phase’ of its development – suggesting there are more new Candy-themed takes on other puzzle genres incoming.
Here’s what we got from our interview with Ingvar shortly after that talk:
- King’s ‘launch and learn’ ethos meant Candy Crush Solitaire’s day one was more low-key
- But it’ll be tweaking the game more aggressively as player feedback rolls in
- Those Match 3D and Blast soft launches could return
- King continues to look at expanding the Candy franchise into new genres
- Microsoft’s ownership hasn’t changed much – yet – and King still has full “self-determination”
The below conversation has been edited for clarity and readability.
Are we going to be seeing more Candy franchise launches after Solitaire?
It’s the first time we’ve moved into a different genre with Candy…we’re always looking out for opportunities to expand, or, you know, build relationships with new audiences. So I think that’s an ‘always on’ thing for us.
The Solitaire launch was a tremendous moment with the fact that it’s the first non-match 3 game in the franchise – it’s doing what it’s supposed to in terms of setting some records.
So we’ll always be on the lookout for those unexpected avenues that might turn into something. You know, for every good and successful idea, there’s easily 10 that didn’t make it. It’s just the nature of game development. We need to explore, and at the testing phase that’s when we get the receipts. You can have a hunch, but that’s really where the decisions are made.
You have used the phrase ‘launch and learn’ around Candy Crush Solitaire – how much of the game can you change from player feedback, and how quickly?
We can change things as quickly as we would want, depending on if it’s something severe or something light, or if it’s something we already have in our roadmap.
I think with ‘launch and learn’, I personally love that expression because in our past language we would be talking about the traditional soft launch, hard launch being a high stakes moment – you push all the levers, you have a big event on the platforms with featuring, you invest in marketing and try to get, like, as high up as you can into the stratosphere from all of that.
So the previous thing we learned from that was everything depends on how high you get during that hard launch phase and then it’s managed decline. This is how we viewed it long ago, like ten years ago.
Then Candy took us by surprise, you know – it absolutely did not decline – and Soda came out and was meant to replace Candy Crush and thrived and became like a complimentary sister title. So it’s like okay, let’s change the mental model.
Between that point in time and where we are now, I mean, a lot has happened in terms of how we think about launching games, the stakes have gone up and it’s just much more expensive to do a proper launch and that virality factor has become harder to get. So I think ‘launch and learn’ is exactly the right approach.
I think it’s great that we’re experimenting with different ways of doing things.
We’ve seen the likes of Candy 3D and Candy Blast not make it through to global launch. Could they return as part of this new ‘franchise phase’ you talked about? What factors push a soft launch game to go global?
You never know – we always have it in our back pocket…if we developed it, it’s always going to be there for us in in case we want to go down the path again.
This is not specific to those projects, but the things that often come into play when we’re looking at a launch of a new title is it has to be complementary to the franchise. It has to expand the notion of the franchise, or be complimentary to the other titles – it just has to make sense in the family.
And there can be a variety of other things, like that it won’t beat expectations or the content treadmill is too punishing…those are things that we learn between the soft launch phase and what we used to call the hard launch phase.
Even if they don’t return as full launches, do you ever recycle the work or the learnings from those soft launches into your other games or live ops?
We always have this mindset that it’s in service of Candy and all the other franchises too. So yes, recycling ideas or drawing inspiration [from that work] is a great way to kind of preserve or honour the work that has been committed to that project. But again, we don’t really see them as like, killed or dead…they’re resting, they’re in our pocket, we can always reassess.
What has changed about King since the Microsoft takeover?
It’s calmer than you would think…we’re still in the early days of being excited to be part of that bigger family. It’s even more of an upgrade from the [Activision Blizzard] acquisition as well.
We’re in live operations – we have a business model, we work on that, we have a self- determination – so the short answer is it’s business as usual.
