Sugar rush: London's gone crazy for the Candy Crush game

My name is Sam and I’m an addict. Even when I’m asleep I’m dreaming of that shiny blue crystal... Specifically, I’m wondering whether I can line it up with another three shiny blue crystals to create a stripey candy to go with my wrapped candy and blast a whole three rows off the board at once clearing that tricky last jelly.

Apologies. I’m not high. I’m talking about Candy Crush Saga. Most of you will probably know what I mean, but in brief: it’s a game played on Facebook, smartphones and tablets that presents you with a board of different, brightly coloured sweeties in a grid. Each move, you can swap the positions of two adjacent sweets. If in so doing you make a row of three, four or five of the same colour, they will vanish with a satisfying pop. On this basic mechanic are endless variations played. I am stuck (mild annoyance) on level 350 (deep shame).

In my twenties and early thirties the games that satisfied my somewhat addictive personality were played on a console — sprawling, immersive first-person shooters or adventure games. But when you acquire young children and a wife who (selfishly!) expects some civil-ised conversation at the end of the day, things change. Even if you own a high-spec PC or console, you seldom have two hours on the trot to play it. There are also those — many but by no means all of them women — who don’t see themselves as gamers and won’t have owned a console in the first place; and there are the young ones, still not quite up to Xbox but easily entranced by a shiny, intuitive iPad game.

It is to people like me, and people like them, that these simple ‘pick-up’ or ‘casual’ games, played for ten minutes here and there on Facebook or a tablet, appeal. They occupy an idle moment on the Tube, or a sneaky five minutes between meetings, or while putting the kettle on. The players split roughly 50/50 between men and women. It is a vast market, hugely outnumbering those who’d self-identify as gamers. And that means there are megabucks to be made — as often as not in increments of 69p. As a result the business model for these games is now coming under scrutiny. Candy Crush, like most others of its type, is a so-called ‘freemium’ game: you can start playing for free but are encouraged to make in-game purchases to speed your progress. With children among the many users of these games (and children have at best a shaky grasp of the difference between 50p and £50), the Office of Fair Trading is now concerned to establish formal guidelines to prevent the manufacturers exploiting the ‘inexperience, vulnerability and credulity’ of their younger users.

There’s no question that, done right, ‘freemium’ works. Candy Crush’s manufacturer is King, a UK-based company with a David-and-Goliath story; in April, it dethroned the once-mighty Zynga as the world’s biggest manufacturer of pick-up games. The casual gaming companies that make it big have more often been scrappy startups than corporate behemoths. King’s ‘games guru’ Tommy Palm, for instance, is regarded as highly unusual in that he wears suits. He was voted ‘Best Dressed Man in Videogames 2012’, a distinction up there with ‘Best Pole Vaulter in the Old Folks’ Home’. One really big game — for Zynga it was Farmville; for Rovio it was Angry Birds — can be the making of these companies; although, of course, their waning can be the breaking of them. On the back of Angry Birds, Rovio, which was started by three students in 2003, went on to become a huge player in the market.

King — biggest of all, just at the moment — is now reported to be preparing for an IPO in the States. It claims its games are played 30 billion times a month, and estimates of the revenues from Candy Crush alone range from about £400,000 to £500,000 per day.

The business model is one of fiendish genius. Why is Candy Crush Saga, in particular, so insanely successful when match-three games have been with us since, well, noughts and crosses? In the first place, it is slick and well designed. It looks and sounds lovely, its difficulty curve is exquisitely calibrated, and it has, like Angry Birds before it, the supreme quality you might call justonemoregoishness, the videogame equivalent of umami.

But it does more than that. It spreads its tentacles on social media and it exploits its umami. Every 20 levels (about a day or two’s play; although if you get stuck, it can be much longer) you’re asked whether you want to get access to the next 20 levels. You can do this either by advertising the game — asking your friends on Facebook to click a button that will gift you the levels — or by paying.

The utter shame and annoyance and anti-kudos of pestering my friends to save me 69p, while at the same time admitting I’m wasting time on Candy Crush Saga, means I fork out every time. As I say, I’m on level 350, which means that I have spent 69p every 20 levels, and 350 divided by... er... times... err… Well, it’s £12 or so, a dribble at a time. When you consider how many people are playing it worldwide that adds up.

There’s another aspect to the ‘freemium’ side of things. You can get through all of the game’s 485 (and rising) levels, with enough luck and perseverance, without using any cheats. But if you want cheats, they’re there to be bought. A few more moves if you’re just nearly there at the end of a level? More lives? A three-use Lollipop Hammer to smash a hard-to-reach square? Yours for a quid or so. Until recently, and to the utter embogglation of the likes of me, there were ‘charms’ (permanent leg-ups that gave you extra lives, or allowed you to cheat once per level) that cost up to £27.99. Not a misprint. These quietly vanished — and in the absence of an official explanation I can only assume that these charms proved resistible enough that King decided the affront they caused was no longer worth the revenue they brought in.