King's next mission: How to come up with hits bigger than Candy Crush Saga (interview)

Above: Candy Crush Soda Saga

Image Credit: King

GamesBeat: Michael Pachter was saying that he thinks as many as 15 percent of the people on the internet have played the original game.

Knutsson: It’s probably true. We know that in some countries — in Hong Kong, where it was a social phenomenon early, 80 or 90 percent of all smartphones had installed Candy Crush. Among the population of smartphone owners, we have a very high penetration. It’s one of those social talking points. You see someone on the plane or the train — everyone from the flight attendants to the travelers in first class are playing Candy Crush.

GamesBeat: Does that put some pressure on you guys to come up with the next great thing?

Knutsson: You always want to do the game justice and keep innovating. At the same time, it’s not like the console industry, where you made the game, left it behind, and in two years or so you’re trying to beat that game you did two years ago. We’ve been updating Candy Crush Saga every two weeks. We’re still very much innovating with that game. We just want to bring something new and make sure we can innovate there as well.

GamesBeat: You also do that with your other kinds of games, like Bubble Witch or Farm Heroes. I’m curious about some of the decisions you have to make about where to put your people to work.

Knutsson: We want to be agile and keep all our teams to a manageable size. There’s no case where, just because a game becomes very popular, we keep growing the team to a bigger size than any others. If you look at the size of Farm Heroes Saga or Pet Rescue Saga or Candy, the team sizes are fairly similar. The question is just, how much can they do? Making the right choices.

Coming to Xbox as a platform may take more people, or migrating to a new mobile platform. But when you have a small team, you want to keep it agile. It’s about prototyping, what makes the most sense where you have the most players, what brings more value to the company.

GamesBeat: Have you seen some difference in the way you do things versus the way some other hit makers have gone about it?

Knutsson: It’s always hard to benchmark from the outside looking in. I don’t know exactly how other people do it. Many companies, I think, have tried to keep small team sizes. I don’t think everybody’s done that historically, but we find that there’s a benefit to small game teams. We try to keep many studios, as opposed to building huge studios. We’d rather have small studios that max out around 70 or 80 people. Those can manage two or three games. For us that’s a good size, if you still want to have good flexibility and a dynamic company.

The challenge is, when you have many studios, how do you make sure they share their learnings and share mistakes with each other? Especially when they’re in different geographical locations. We focus on that — sharing our learning and sharing our failures. It’s tricky to get people to admit to and talk about their failures, but that’s where you have the best learning. That’s why we get studio team members together quite often. We have specific team members focusing on that communication.

GamesBeat: Does it ever get tempting to find ways to spend all that money King is generating? It seems like given your small size, you’re only spending a small part of what’s coming in.

Knutsson: We just don’t think that adding more bodies to a project can necessarily help it. We find, and I think other people who look at agile development have found, that a small team can make a big difference. If you make a team bigger, it doesn’t necessarily become more effective. It just increases the amount of communication you have to manage.

GamesBeat: How many studios are you at now?

Knutsson: We have two in Stockholm, one in Malmo, meet them. two in London, two in Barcelona, then Singapore, Berlin, and Bucharest. So that’s nine studios.

GamesBeat: Are you at peak levels with each one, or are you still expanding?

Knutsson: No, several are still expanding. We’ve been expanding Singapore, but slowly. They’re on their first games. Berlin as well, which was built organically quite recently. There’s a lot of growth to be had in the studios. Like anything, it’s always about finding the right people, not about quickly getting headcount in. If you don’t get the right headcount it doesn’t really help you.

GamesBeat: How often are you going to update Soda?

Knutsson: The aim is to keep the bi-weekly pace, and in some cases we’re looking for a weekly pace. You can update often, but at the same time you need to make sure nothing breaks. The iOS update cycle takes time for us. It’s up to each and every game team to choose. I think most of them find that the bi-weekly pace is a good one.

GamesBeat: Is there any sort of trick you’ve learned as far as how to get people to stay current with the game, to catch up?

Knutsson: On Facebook you get the latest version automatically. On mobile, more and more handsets are allowing you to enable auto-updating. So that’s been less of a problem. It’s more of a question of what are the key things to bring to our updates — more levels, more features — and making sure we bring value to the players with every update.

GamesBeat: What else is interesting you right now as far as where mobile games are in general?

Knutsson: The mobile market is growing so fast right now. That’s interesting in itself. People look at the top 10 a lot, but that’s just a slice of the business. A company in the top 30 or the top 50 is becoming much more viable. More businesses are cropping up. The industry is maturing.

At the same time, I think personally there’s some big evolution to be had on the social side of games. Many of the new gamers coming in to play games on mobile, they often play these solo game experiences. Our Sagas are slightly more social single-player games. The next stage, now that these people are playing games regularly, is to feed an appetite for more engaging social gameplay, more social interaction.

GamesBeat: Do you mean multiplayer specifically, or other things?

Knutsson: It’s a lot of things. Multiplayer as it’s done on the PC doesn’t really work for handsets, where people want to pick up the game and play for three minutes on the subway. They don’t want to sit in a lobby and wait for a match. You have to rethink how to create a bite-sized, asynchronous gameplay that works for the mobile audience.

But people are more interested in meeting other players and seeing new things that way. We’ll see games do more social interaction, like Words With Friends had, where players are interacting over the game and making acquaintances through the game. That’s a trend I see continuing into the next year.

GamesBeat: It’s always hard to predict where the whole mobile game industry is going to grow next, where to put your resources to make something new happen.

Knutsson: What we believe is that it’s not about pushing the number of pixels. It’s not like the console cycle used to be, about cooler graphics. There are so many classic gameplay moments and experiences you can make viable on a handset. That’s more important than just trying to get more pixels or cooler 3D on the screen. The average player wants a great game. The question is, how do you make a great game you can carry with you and pick up for three minutes? It’s a different behavior on mobile that you have to build game ideas around. Typical core and mid-core games, they like their kinds of games, but you have to rethink them to bring them to mobile in an effective way.

GamesBeat: Does it ever surprise you that console companies haven’t come to dominate the mobile business?

Knutsson: Well, I think it’s refreshing. And it’s not so surprising. They almost did a few years back, when it was still about volume of releases and more about paid games. They were confident launching many titles, dropping a game and going on to the next one. But when you run a game as a service, which is the most predominant model today, it’s a very different mindset. They haven’t developed that thinking in the console industry yet.

Many more experienced companies from the Asian side of the industry have done that for a lot longer. Players there have grown up with free-to-play. We’re seeing more inspiration coming out of those territories.

GamesBeat: You have such powerful brands now. The console game companies relied on brands for a long time, but they haven’t necessarily been able to use those to dominate in mobile.

Knutsson: We’ve invested a lot into building our brands. We think there’s a long-term value in brands like Candy Crush and Farm Heroes. The recognition behind those is always increasing. It’s a long-term investment. At the same time, as you say, you might expect brands that were powerful on consoles to come into mobile and dominate, but it’s hard to create mobile gameplay. If you can’t translate the classic gameplay that people expect, the brand might not help you at all.

For us it’s been helpful that the brand expectations we’re creating are tied to the mobile experience we provide. We don’t have legacy expectations that we have to manage when we go to mobile. We’re creating the expectations when we launch our games.

GamesBeat: What’s your studio like?

Knutsson: I’m based in Stockholm, but I’m responsible for work across all our games. I work regularly with all of our studios. I’d prefer to do individual game design, but there’s not much time for that anymore, for me. Soda specifically was developed by a team here in Stockholm, though, where the original Candy team is also based.

GamesBeat: Was there anything in particular, anything visible in the design of Soda, that resulted from fan feedback on the original game?

Knutsson: We always have those pain levels. Level 75 has turned out to be the one that everybody hates. We had a lot of feedback even from the mobile reviews about that particular level. That’s something we’re receptive to, though, and we’re trying to fix it.

Otherwise, we’re looking at what type of levels players like the most and we’ve tried to build more of those. We’ve put in some long playtest sessions to get that information, what they tell us and what they show us.