King flew a select group of media out to Stockholm last week to tour its plush office and update the press on what’s happening at the Candy Crush maker.
We spoke to King boss Tjodolf Sommestad at a fascinating time in the company’s history. It is beginning to integrate itself into its new owner Microsoft, having previously been acquired by Activision in 2016 for $5.9bn.
Microsoft’s gaming execs have made several bold statements about its ambitions in mobile – from launching its own “gamer first” app store to stating that buying Activision-Blizzard-King is all about getting a foothold in mobile, rather than buying up Call of Duty.
Here, we quiz Sommestad on how King could drive Microsoft’s mobile game strategy, what’s going on with Rebel Racers, those Candy Crush games in soft launch, what went wrong with Crash Bandicoot and yes, even web shops and a potential Xbox app store.
The below conversation has been edited for clarity and readability.
When we last spoke in September it was early days in terms of King’s integration into Microsoft, how is all that going? Has anything changed day-to-day?
The short answer is it’s business as usual. We have many colleagues to learn from and interact with and I’m involved in a bit of a new wider team constellation. But broadly, we’re very independent, we’re running the business as we did six months ago.
We’re unique in that we’re a really mobile first company, not only do we do casual games, but we also do almost all of it on mobile. That’s where our attention is, and it’s not where Microsoft Gaming or Xbox is coming from. So we’re a new type of company for them, and we just started learning from and learning with them.
We’re starting to see some interesting opportunities that we were hoping for, and we’re now also starting to see the possibilities around AI where they are giving us some opportunity to learn a bit faster from them and get access to tooling that probably would have taken longer for us to get access to if we were not part of Microsoft. But it’s early days, we’re six months in.
Is King now effectively at the forefront of Microsoft’s mobile game strategy?
I think we will be a key part of that. The short term version is we haven’t joined forces and figured out what the longer term approach is, to formulate a Microsoft gaming mobile strategy.
We will do more, but with the size of our business, and the reach and capabilities that we have at King, we clearly have an important role to play in that. But that in the very short term it’s more like: ‘keep delivering great games and leverage AI if you can’.
From the outside it looks like everything at Microsoft/Xbox is geared around Game Pass, but King is a very different business. Are those two things going to come together eventually? They seem a little incompatible.
I don’t think they have to come together, I think there’s opportunity for many different business models. We distribute primarily on mobile, our games are free to play, we are games as a service, that’s sort of our recipe. We have monetization models that include in-app purchase and now advertising…for PC and console games and different places to distribute, we’re looking at that as well. Where can we distribute? How can reach players in the future? We have a very mobile-centric perspective. And when we look at data, the vast, vast majority of mobile is free to play and that has been the business model that’s been successful in mobile. I don’t think that’s going to change dramatically.
Are there opportunities to add alternative business models to offer consumers more choice? Yeah, I think there is down the line. But it’s not a priority right now.
With the size of Microsoft gaming, companies like King that are capable of running their business relatively independently are just asked to keep doing that, and if we can find synergies to work together we’ll do that in the future.
We’re not in discussions right now around how to bring Game Pass to mobile, at least I’m not involved in them. And we need to think about what the consumers want. It’s not my understanding that Microsoft gaming has this ideal that Game Pass needs to be everywhere.
Phil Spencer has said there are discussions happening around Microsoft’s own app store, is there any update on that and how you see that emerging?
There’s no specific update. When we have something to announce, we will do that. But it is an area that is interesting. I don’t know exactly what Phil has said, but it is something that we’re paying close attention to as well.
There are things happening in the industry and we will see the outcomes in different areas, the DMA, etcetera. So I think it is something where there might be opportunities and if we can offer more choice for players then I’d be interested in King being part of that.
Let’s get onto new games. You’ve not released a new game globally for years, where do you see your next hit coming from?
Of course we want to launch another hit game but our main focus is on how we make Candy Crush better and how we make Soda Saga better. But the same time we are testing some ideas with players like in the market.
We’re exploring what the appetite is for different content and sometimes we’re testing an idea in the shape of a game, but actually that idea might might come to life in another game or in another format. It is a way to test ideas with layers under the banner of a new game.
We set a very high bar and it is hard to find that that amazing hit game that will resonate with players at such a high bar. Most of our teams are innovating in our big games today to make sure that they’re better. So in a way I think ‘the next Candy Crush’ is Candy Crush in two years, or Candy Crush in three years – we kind of keep transforming the game.
So of those Candy Crush games in testing – Candy 3D, Solitaire, Blast, Cubes…how are those performing and where are they on the road to to global launch?
We don’t know yet. So, yes, between those four, there’s some we think are more promising than others but we haven’t decided on what the next steps are.
It’s a long way like to go from idea and early test to launching the game. We set a very high bar and there are many more steps to go through before we’re at a place where we say we’’e going to launch this game.
Is there any update on Rebel Riders, which I think is or was being made here in Stockholm?
Yes [the Rebel Riders team] was partially here and part of the team is in Barcelona. Right now we we have paused that game, I would say. We’re not actively working on it right now and we took the decision to prioritise other projects.
Your last big release was Crash Bandicoot: On The Run, which didn’t quite work out. What did you learn from that launch and how has that informed how you think about other new games?
When we work with known IP, our ability to test and learn is going be a bit limited because of the attention it gets from fans and media…so there’s a bit more caution in how we test and we had to rethink a bit how we do that.
We knew that we needed to have really strong long term retention for a game to last and we didn’t get there with Crash Bandicoot. I still think we did the right things, we had the intent to innovate in the running genre – it is massive and still a mass market. Subway Surfers is doing great stuff and it’s a great genre to be in, it ticks the box of what we want to do – making the world playful, mass market and so on.
We wanted to innovate on that and introduce better retention and something positive for players to really invest into, rather than repeat runs over and over again. We didn’t get that right, but that doesn’t mean that we will stop.
What we learned from it is that the core loop is, in the end, the most important thing. We spent a lot of time on that game thinking about the meta, but in the end the running part needs to be really good, the obstacles, and the care and attention you need on each level – it needs to be a game that you don’t want to put down because you just want to try the next level, like in our Saga games.
It’s related to why why we’re talking so much about Candy Crush levels and how we can use new technology like AI to improve our levels, because that’s where players are spending all their time. That really needs to be perfect. The meta and the context you put that in for players comes second.
Finally – what about web shops, is that something that you are considering adding into your in-app purchase funnel?
We’ve done some tests on that in the past, we’ve had our loyalty programme where you also can make purchases. It is an area that we are looking into. We have nothing that we’re launching to players but we’re also paying attention to what’s happening.
