King has launched Candy Crush Solitaire around the world as the latest mobile game that carries the Candy Crush brand.
It’s been a while since King launched a game. In fact, I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s been years. The company is a division of Activision Blizzard, which is a division of Microsoft. King has a couple thousand or so developers and it has 200 million players. But its big focus has been on churning out more live services content for Candy Crush Saga.
Of course, I would guess that King doesn’t want to admit it, but it’s chasing Balatro here. Balatro sold more than five million copies and it was made by a single developer. It is a cross between solitaire and poker.
Todd Green, general manager of the Candy Crush franchise at King, said in an interview with GamesBeat said that Candy Crush Solitaire brings a fresh take to the classic card game, combining the timeless fun of solitaire with the vibrant and colorful world of Candy Crush.
The game will have a thousand levels on day one — perhaps the most content ever launched with a King game. Green said he was impressed with the variety of the different levels, which can be modified through boosters, a slot mechanic and different game modes and blockers on the board.
The game play
Candy Crush Solitaire offers players a fun, mentally stimulating challenge, combining the familiar gameplay of TriPeaks solitaire with challenging levels, innovative gameplay, and tasty rewards, as they are immersed into the sensory and whimsical Candy Crush universe.
Beloved characters join players on a sweet journey around the world, collecting Candified postcards and delicious rewards as they progress through the game, solving puzzles and stacking cards. This new mobile game offering will launch with a set of features, including the “Hold Slot”, enabling players to set cards aside for later use, or they can unleash the fan-favorite Candy Color Bomb booster — reimagined in card form — to conquer tricky levels.
Green said the game has been in testing for a few months in places like Germany and Mexico.
Bringing something new to the game
“With so many Solitaire games on the market, you’re collecting cards and different challenges. But there’s a couple of things that we particularly like about the game,” Green said. “It’s beautifully polished, plays really nicely, and has a lot of small details in the polish.”
He added, “For example, the way that the boosters interact with the cards, and the way that the card collection works, particularly when you’re doing it quickly. It’s handled extremely nicely. The cards fly in and they’re queued up and then land with a nice sort of visual impact.”
It hits a quality bar that you expect from the Candy Crush franchise, he said.
“The second thing is that the game we’ve added a couple of new novel twists to the gameplay. So while we hope this game is going to appeal to people who already like playing solitaire games, there are a couple of bits that we think are a bit different,” Green said. “One is that we’ve imported a couple of boosters from these Candy Crush match-3 games. Like when you can use the lollipop hammer just as in the match-3 games, we use that to remove specific pieces on the board. So in this case it works very similar. You can try to collect the cards onto your pile. You can use the hammer, Bop! Let’s collect that card. Bang! Let’s get that card in. So it works very nicely as an extra choice for the player.”
It’s actually the first time that King has moved outside of match-3 for a long time.
A big legacy
Candy Crush Solitaire builds on the success of Candy Crush Saga, the highest-grossing mobile game of all time in the Western world since its launch [source: Data.ai]. The game has maintained its relevance and reaffirmed its position as one of the global leaders in mobile gaming. As of September 2024, the game had generated more than $20 billion in revenues as of the fall of 2023 since its debut in 2013.
“We’re excited to take a timeless card game like solitaire and reimagine it through the lens of the iconic Candy Crush brand,” said Tjodolf Sommestad, president of King, in a statement. “The launch of Candy Crush Solitaire marks an important step in King’s strategy to expand our portfolio by combining classic gameplay with our expertise in creating immersive, player-focused mobile experiences. This new addition not only strengthens the Candy Crush franchise’s global reach but also delivers fresh, innovative ways for players to connect and engage with the games they love, all with that signature Candy Crush energy.”
With Candy Crush first captivating players worldwide through Candy Crush Saga, the match-3 mobile gaming phenomenon, the franchise continues to evolve, boasting over 18,000 levels and now expanding into new genres to bring its iconic fun to even more players around the globe.
It’s takes a lot to get a game like this out the door. Green noted that the launch was a process, rather than a single event, and it was the end of a long arc that started from the game being greenlit to go into production. There’s a lot of testing and art creation and then bouncing that off of players.
Since 2023, King has been part of the Microsoft family, and when asked about the most recent solitaire game, Paul Jensen, general manager of casual games at Microsoft, said in a statement, “As the most popular card game of all time, Microsoft solitaire is hugely special to us at Microsoft. We’re thrilled to see King create an exciting new twist to solitaire as the newest addition to King’s widely loved Candy Crush franchise. The launch marks an exciting milestone as our businesses look to work together to bring more choice and innovation to the mobile gaming market in the future.”
Candy Crush Solitaire is free to download and available now on the Amazon App Store, Apple App Store, Google Play, Samsung Galaxy Store and more. The executive producer was Marta Cortinas, a ten-year veteran at King.
King has studios in in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta.
Can it be bigger than Balatro?
King is putting a big effort to get the game in front of everyone.
“We’ve got to the point where we can scale this really fast. For prime time, we’ll still be in a progressive launch over the next few weeks and months, depending on what kind of response we see. But we’ll switch it on for everybody and we’ve had massive preinstalls since we did a partnership with platforms to both gain over the last couple of weeks and get pre-registrations,” Green said.
Green said the company is always trying out different concepts in casual puzzle games. Solitaire was one of many projects running in parallel, and it happened that this got a strong response from players. And it lived up to the core values of the Candy Crush DNA and its visual language, he said.
“This was a project where we felt like we were able to offer something new to players,” he said.
While he noted Balatro is popular, he said this category feels adjacent to the match-3 genre.
“It’s much less important to us what is the existing competition there and rather can we make something that genuinely feels fun,” Green said. “We’ve actually had a solitaire game, Pyramid Solitaire Saga, that’s been live for more than 10 years. So it’s not something new for us to try to make a great solitaire game. It’s more from the inside out rather than the outside in.”
The post Candy Crush Solitaire debuts as 1st King game in a while appeared first on Venture Beat.
