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Friday Flashback: Candy Crush Saga revealed as the second 'billion dollar' mobile game

Puzzle & Dragons has a rival

Friday Flashback: Candy Crush Saga revealed as the second 'billion dollar' mobile game

Update: It's sometimes surprisingly easy to confuse failure and success, at least when it comes in the shape of quarterly financials figures.

So while King has just announced its FY15 Q2 figures, with sales and profits down, let's remember that this is just a relative decline from a monumental peak.

This was driven by Candy Crush Saga, which was the second game ever to be a billion dollar franchise on mobile, as this Flashback article from February 2014 highlights.

 

Following King's announcement of its IPO, the company has released some interesting figures.

Perhaps the most significant is just how important Candy Crush Saga is to its overall business.

Across mobile and Facebook, it has 93 million daily active users, and it accounts for 78 percent of King's gross bookings.

Given that annual revenues in 2013 were $1.9 billion, we can assume that Candy Crush Saga generated $1.5 billion.

Sweet success

Throw in another stat - 73 percent of King's revenue comes from mobile players - and we get the answer that $1.1 billion of King's 2013 revenue came from the mobile players of Candy Crush Saga.

Of course, that's making the assumption that 73 percent of Candy Crush Saga's revenue come from mobile players. However, given the popularity of the title on mobile and the winner-takes-all financials of the platform, I'd expect that percentage to actually be higher.

Equally, even if the percentage is lower, King is generating so much cash on daily basis - around $3.8 million from mobile games - that Candy Crush Saga will have made one billion dollars by now.

On that basis, then, we can say that Candy Crush Saga is one of only two mobile games to generated one billion dollars in sales, the other being GungHo Online's Puzzle & Dragons.


Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.