The future of King.com, the maker of Candy Crush, depends on whether or not it can develop new hits to follow up its rise to worldwide prominence. Something others who have come before it have not been able to do.
King.com / Via lifeatking.tumblr.com
If you don't already play it, you've seen it — on the subway, in line at the grocery store, or in the elevator. It's a simple, brightly-colored, pattern-matching game called Candy Crush Saga, and it's the hottest game on the planet. Tens of millions of people play it on their phones every day, and yet almost none of them could name the company that puts it out.
That would be King.com, a 550-person company that has ridden the explosive popularity of the game to a confidential IPO filing (think: Twitter). A public offering will infuse cash into the already booming company and, potentially, help it grow even faster. What could go wrong?
Well, ask Zynga. In 2009, that company released FarmVille, which also held Candy Crush-level momentum, and two years later helped propel Zynga to one of the largest tech IPOs since Google. But in the intervening four years since Farmville's release, Zynga has seen its value completely collapse from a series of bad decisions that ultimately led to CEO Mark Pincus stepping down. In short, it couldn't find another game to match the success of FarmVille and its follow-up CityVille.
The challenge before King.com is to avoid Zynga's fate in the immediate aftermath of its IPO. (Zynga, to be fair, in currently in the midst of a turnaround.) To do that, it must leverage the popularity of Candy Crush Saga into a stable and growing public company.
It won't be easy — interviews with nearly a dozen insiders, former and current employees at Zynga, industry watchers and designers, reveal that there are still significant questions around King's ability to branch out beyond its superstar game. However, the good news is that King.com has built an organizational infrastructure specifically designed to avoid suffering Zynga's fate — provided they are able to find a future beyond Candy Crush Saga.
King.com / Via lifeatking.tumblr.com
King.com has in fact been around even longer than Zynga. Founded in 2003, the company went largely unrecognized until the launch of Bubble Witch Saga — a bubble-popping game — in September 2011. Candy Crush Saga followed just eight months later, launching first on Facebook in April 2012. Things didn't take off for King.com, however, until it ported the two games to mobile later that year. Now, roughly 100 million people play its games daily, and more than half of those people are playing Candy Crush Saga, according to AppData, a service that tracks apps connected to Facebook. King.com also says Candy Crush Saga sees 700 million plays every single day.
