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

King launched Candy Crush Soda Saga, the “sister title” to the enormously successful Candy Crush Saga, earlier this week on Facebook. The game is intended to fuel the public’s fascination with this colorful and sweet franchise, which has been out on mobile for under two years.

King has seen a huge wave from Candy Crush Saga, dominating the top ranking charts on mobile for a couple of years now. Candy Crush Saga players spent $790.1 million on the game in the first six months of 2014. But the laws of gravity will inevitably bring the hit back to earth, and King is using its profits to open studios and create games that will move into Candy Crush’s slipstream. Investors are worried, and they’ve been selling off King shares this week. The stock is at $11.02 a share, about half of its peak during the past year.

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We talked with Sebastian Knutsson, chief creative officer at King in its Stockholm office, about how the team created the new title and its ambitions for the future. We also talked about the future of mobile games, which are expected to overtake console revenues in 2015, according to Newzoo. The market researcher estimates mobile game revenues will grow from $25 billion in 2014 to $30.3 billion in 2015.

King, of course, wants a big share of that. Here’s an edited transcript of our talk.

GamesBeat: Was there some history to the Soda game? Did it have any life on the Web, as one of your older games, or is this a new thing?

Sebastian Knutsson: It’s a brand-new game that’s been developed with some members of the original Candy team and some additional people. It’s not come from the web platform onto Facebook and mobile. It’s a fresh take on the game people have known before on mobile.

GamesBeat: How long ago did this get started?

Knutsson: A year ago or so. We’ve been treading cautiously with such a massively successful game in Candy. We wanted a game that could add something fresh, but would still be unmistakably Candy somehow. That’s not an easy challenge, so we’ve been taking it slow. It was about finding the right gameplay, testing it with users, getting good feedback, and iterating until we had a great game.

GamesBeat: It sounds like you’re following the formula King has used for a while: launching a game on Facebook and optimizing before moving on to mobile.

Knutsson: We’ve been soft testing the game on Facebook for a while, but also testing it on mobile for a while. The original Candy Crush started on Facebook first, whereas in this case we started with both in parallel, to make sure we’re up to the same feature set on both platforms.

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GamesBeat: Did you use the same technology as Candy Crush, or have you moved to anything new?

Knutsson: We’ve redone the whole engine from scratch. We’re not promoting it too much, but if you play on Facebook and look in the settings, you’ll find things like a full screen mode. You’ll probably appreciate it a bit more that now it’s full 3D all the way through.

GamesBeat: What are some things that you figured out during the testing that tell you something about your users?

Knutsson: When you have a game that’s great — something that’s not broken, and yet you’re trying to fix it — it’s never an easy challenge to try to keep what’s great and still bring something fresh. We’ve been trying to find new gameplay that is different enough that it feels like a sister game, to be played side by side, and yet you know where you’re starting from. If you’ve played Candy Crush it should be easy to get into. At the same time, it shouldn’t be for Candy Crush experts. Even a new player should be able to understand this new game.

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We tried a lot of game mechanics and found ways to do hundreds of levels that are quite different from the original Candy Crush. We have five new game modes and a lot of fun new candies to experiment with and combine. But at the core, we still use the same game mechanics from the original Candy.

What people react the most to is the soda mode. That’s why we called this Soda Saga. That’s where you start to see some of the big differences. In some levels the candy is closed up in the soda instead of dropping down like it used to. That takes some time to get used to, but once you learn how to master that, it becomes a totally different game from the original.

GamesBeat: What’s some of the thinking behind your timing of the release, as far as doing it so that you don’t take away the audience from Candy Crush, but you also keep those people busy so the audience overall doesn’t decline?

Knutsson: It’s been about finding a game where players who love Candy Crush can have even more Candy Crush. At some point you always run out of lives, and then you can try using your lives in Soda instead. But I think as far as timing, the game is ready when it’s ready, when it’s good enough. At the same time, Candy is still a huge game, hugely successful. We want some of our audience to join Soda as well, and those players will hopefully enjoy both side by side.

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We’re also doing some of the biggest expansion we’ve ever had in the original Candy Crush. The team for the original game is as big as ever. We’re doing some big expansions for early next year to update that game as well. This doesn’t mean that we’re shifting our focus to Soda instead. We’re focusing on both games.

GamesBeat: How many levels is the original Candy Crush at now? Or both together?

Knutsson: The original is probably around 600. To be honest, I’m stuck at 481. I haven’t seen the last original one. With Dreamworld, we’re way past 1,000 levels in the original Candy Crush. On the new one, we’re going to launch with 135 at the start and we’ll keep updating the levels on a fairly rapid basis.

GamesBeat: It sounds like an awful lot of content there.

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Knutsson: The players always want more content. I was talking to the lead producer on Soda the other day about the user testing side. He had a story about his mother playing the game. She had complained about level 75, and that was the last level of the early playtest build. It was pretty hard, and she was complaining about it. Then, when she finally completed it, she called him and straight away asked when he would have more levels.

That’s always the reaction from players. You have to have a rapid pace of level production, because there are always people who hit the end and want more. At the same time, people get spread out over time. Some get stuck earlier. But when you finally pass that hard level, you don’t want to just get to a point where there’s no content behind it. That’s how we’re setting up the teams to work.

GamesBeat: What’s your reaction to the popularity of the original Candy Crush, how far it’s reached?

Knutsson: The success has been massive, and it took us partly by surprise. We’re humbled by the success and trying to make sure we make our players happy. We want to be proud of our games. We see this very much as managing the franchise, extending it with additional great games, and making sure people can keep enjoying Candy Crush.

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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.