King
More info
- Creator
- Riccardo Zacconi, Sebastian Knutsson, Toby Rowland et al.
- Released
- 2003
- Owner
- Microsoft, via Activision Blizzard
- Type
- Mobile game developer
The Stockholm company behind Candy Crush Saga, which began with cash-prize web games and ended up with half the world's commuters swapping sweets.
Several founders came from the Swedish portal Spray. Through the 2000s King made small web games, often as tournaments with real money at stake. The playbook became: test a game on King.com, move the winners to Facebook, then to mobile. Candy Crush Saga, a take on the old match-three formula, followed exactly that path in 2012 and became one of the most played and most profitable mobile games ever.
It's free, but the levels are tuned so that an extra few moves for pocket change via in-app purchase feel reasonable. In 2014 the company tried to trademark the word "candy", which went about as well as you'd expect. It listed in New York the same year and was bought by Activision Blizzard in 2016 for $5.9 billion. Much of the development still happens in Stockholm.