Why Candy Crush Saga is the most pervasive and insanely addictive game in the world. In case you were wondering...
In October last year, a headline in the UK’s Daily Mail screamed that “...women blow £400,000 a day playing Candy Crush, the most addictive online game ever”. This came five months after the publication had carried a piece titled ‘Candy Crush Saga soars above Angry Birds to become world’s most popular game’ and less than a year after the game had hit smartphones, leading to over 10 million downloads in a month. ¡ As of April 2014, Candy Crush Saga was the most popular app on Facebook—where it was originally launched two years ago—with more than 100 million active users every month. It was also the most downloaded app of 2013, both in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, with over 500 million installations across devices, and the third most popular free app on Play Store only behind social giants Facebook and WhatsApp.
Candy Crush is a delicious-looking match-three puzzle game modelled on the decade-old, and hugely popular, Bejeweled. The screen is filled with colourful candies—red jelly beans, yellow lemon drops, orange lozenges, green chewing gums, blue lollipop heads, and purple clusters. Players have to horizontally or vertically swap positions of adjacent candies and create sets of three to make them disappear and score points. The game has a total of 575 levels of increasing difficulty.
According to Think Gaming, a data firm that helps developers understand user interactions with games, Candy Crush has about 30,000 daily installs. Since it launched, players from all over the world have spent the equivalent of 103,000 years playing the game. More than a trillion candies have been crushed and King Digital Entertainment, the Irish maker of the game, earns $800,000-$900,000 per day from it. That is more than 16 times what Flappy Bird, the top game on iTunes and Google Play Store before it shut down, generated every day. The game bowed out from the internet in February 2014 because its 29-year-old maker Dong Nguyen thought it had become too “addictive”.
According to a recent report in The Guardian, the neurochemical dopamine is released in the brains of compulsive gamers, and they can’t stop playing the game. In psychology, says Raval, this is known as “the schedule of reinforcement” where certain behaviour is reinforced every time it occurs. Most players know that they are hooked to the game, but they cannot free themselves from its tentacles.
‘Yes, It was an Addiction’
Bestselling author Ravi Subramanian reminisces on his brief but intense love affair with Candy Crush
Playing candy crush on the ipad was like experiencing ‘Vegas on Steroids’. I started playing Candy Crush some time in August last year. It was quite annoying to see posts about Candy Crush spamming my newsfeed. Just out of curiosity one day (August 10), I downloaded the free app on my iPad and started playing. That night I was on it till 3 am. Thankfully I didn’t have to go to work the next day. And from thereon I played the game every single day till December 31. On an average, I would have played the game for over an hour-and-half daily. Thankfully, I was not writing a book at that time.
Till the time I played it, it brought colour to my life—the bright red, green, yellow, orange candies were my only crush. Sugar Crush was the most-liked chant and ‘Divine’ was the most motivating word that I would die to hear.
Yes, it was an addiction. The days I would not play Candy Crush at night, I would struggle to sleep. The days I would play Candy Crush, I would struggle to sleep. If I didn’t get past a level, it would irritate. If I did, the next level would seductively invite. The explosion of the candy, the unpredictable nature of the game, and the sudden turn of luck, where one move of the candy would set off a series of explosions, would be enough to keep me going for the next few levels. And when I started passing my friends on my way up, it gave me a sense of joy, of being a winner.
In my quest to get ahead, I did everything that was possible. I did not have the patience to wait for my friends to give me lives—I bought them. I spent a lot of money on boosters at every level, which would help me clear rows, knock off candies, blow up candies of a particular type, colour, etc. It might be dangerous to talk about the amount I spent on these for it might land me in a sticky situation at home.
Candy Crush made me a bit of a hero in my daughter’s school too. Her classmates, who were struggling to cross level 30 and 40, were super impressed to know that I had crossed level 300. And when I zoomed past 400, I got into a different race: A race with the game develo-pers. I wanted to reach the last level available at that time before newer levels were introduced.
I wanted to be at a stage where I could claim that I had completed all available levels. It was becoming an addiction, which started worrying me.
That’s when I promised myself that I would stop playing once I got to the last available level or December 31 (whichever is earlier). And as luck would have it, I reached level 485 on the night of December 31, and I haven’t played the game ever since. I often wonder that if on that day Candy Crush had more than 485 levels, this wouldn’t have become the only New Year resolution I have ever kept in my life.
(This story appears in the May-June 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)