Candy Crush Saga’s $1,400 whales are popular: TV, film, and music want their cash, too

Digital distribution is affecting all forms of media, and gaming has figured out an answer that other industries are starting to look to.

Candy Crush Saga publisher King brought in $2 billion in revenue in 2015 across all of its games, and all of that money came from just 2 percent its total players, according to its annual fiscal report. As Amazon Studios boss Matthew Ball explained in a blog post on op-ed website Redef, approximately 738,000 people spent an average of $1,400 each to generate more than $1 billion for King’s smartphone apps like Candy Crush Soda Saga and Farm Heroes Saga. And Ball claims that the business model of attracting those high-spending whales is something that film and TV content producers need to consider.

Candy Crush Saga is an example of how gaming has refined a business model that enables original content to generate huge amounts of revenue from a small fraction of passionate fans. On mobile, free-to-download games with in-app purchases have helped create a $36.6 billion-a-year business. On PC, mega-popular free-to-play hits like League of Legends and Dota 2 have millions of players and generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually. As with King, most of that money comes from a small percentage of paying customers.

“Not every fan is equally passionate and not every fan should be monetized the same way, at the same rate, and through the same channels,” wrote Ball.

But today, most film and TV companies use an old model of releasing content in windows to maximize their revenue instead of finding ways to let fans spend as much as they want. A movie, for example, goes to the theater for a few months, then hits Blu-ray, and then hits video-on-demand and television. If a fan wants to spend more, their only option is usually another special-edition Blu-ray release.

“To survive in the post-window era, the video industry needs to adapt to [the Candy Crush Saga] model,” wrote Ball. “This doesn’t mean giving your core content away for free, but if a superfan wants to spend $100 or even $1,000 on your content, you need to find a way to let them do so.”