Cooled is fairly relative as King has seen nearly $800 million in in-app purchases through June of this year. However, the game maker whom has enjoyed a tremendous amount of success with Candy Crush Saga has decided its time for a reboot and that is coming in the form of a sequel.
That launch occurred on Monday, but only for Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) users. A stand alone app for both Android and iOS is expected sometime before Christmas though no details were given by King today.
Branding Candy Crush rather than Saga
“We don’t consider it a sequel. It’s just an additional title for the people who love Candy Crush, which is still a huge game being regularly updated with new levels,” King’s chief creative officer Sebastian Knutsson told the UK’s Guardian today.
“It’s one of our biggest launches ever. We wanted to create a game that brought something fresh to Candy Crush. But you can play it side-by-side with the original game, and we will continue developing both in parallel,” he added.
The new game, unsurprisingly, is incorporating soda which flips gravity as players aim to match sweets and create the combos that brought King success with the original game. King has used the word Saga in all its puzzle games but is looking to build on the the “Candy Crush” brand itself as it has been the game maker’s biggest success by quite a measure but is falling off the map a bit.
Riccardo Zacconi, King’s CEO knows this and has admitted as much. “Candy Crush had its peak gross bookings in Q3 of 2013 and accordingly we expect a continual decline in gross bookings from this franchise in Q2,” he recently stated.
“We know we have that capacity. If we keep doing Sagas, and everybody is imitating Sagas as well, of course there’s going to be risk. There is flattery in imitation: we’ve created a format that has become very mainstream… But you have to bring something new to the experience,” said Zacconi when asked about the reason for Soda Saga’s build and release.
Branching out
The company, however, is not wholly a puzzle game maker as demonstrated by its purchase of Singapore game developer Nonstop Games two months ago as it looks to get involved in games outside of its core genre.
“We’re very strong on casual, and have a huge base of players. But we are looking at other types of games we could bring to our network, and Nonstop have experience in those types of games,” he said. “When we look at 2016, we’re going to have a much more blended portfolio of games, but many of those games are early in development,” said Knutsson in a recent interview where he spoke to the fact that mobile gaming continues to grow.
