Inside King’s London headquarters: "We have people in the London studio working on all of our titles"

• We enter King's London studio to speak with president Todd Green, plus members of the marketing team and Farm Heroes Saga.
• King first established a London office in 2012.
• The team moved into the Ampersand building in 2016.
• Farm Heroes Saga was the first UK-made mobile game to hit $1 billion in revenue - and has since surpassed $2bn.

Candy Crush maker King has been in the business for more than 20 years, evolving through multiple phases from Facebook games to mobile phone hits. During those years, the company has also expanded beyond its Swedish home with offices in Berlin, Barcelona and London.

Crucially, the Swedish giant was partly founded in London, where original CEO Riccardo Zacconi helped create the company. Since King opened its first London office 14 years ago, the location has served as its co-headquarters alongside Stockholm. It's the home base for many teams today.

To find out more about day-to-day operations in London, we visit King’s UK studio in the Ampersand building for an exclusive tour across multiple floors and various departments, through colourful halls and candy-packed hauls, up a spiralling staircase, into the music room and out onto a skybound terrace.

On our way around, we speak with key members of the teams that help make King’s many games possible.

Chief among them is president Todd Green, who stepped into the role as Tjodolf Sommestad stepped down last summer. He's quick to note that King has gone through many phases during its two decades of operation and that it's now "coming into a new era".

"The modern version of the company, the way that most people got to know about King, was around the time of 2012 when we launched Candy Crush. Before that there was a long prehistory, including being founded partly in London," Green begins.

"It’s always been a sort of mix of UK and Swedish, from day one."

Catching up in London

King’s London studio was officially founded in 2012 and is perhaps most famous for creating Farm Heroes Saga, the first UK-developed mobile game to reach $1 billion in lifetime revenue. The location was chosen partly because Zacconi was UK-based and partly because of the country’s heritage and history in making video games.

Today, employees in the London studio work on all of King’s games: Farm Heroes Saga, Candy Crush Saga, Candy Crush Solitaire and more. Titles like Farm Heroes Saga predominantly rely on the London studio for development, while for flagship Candy Crush Saga it's most of the marketing team that's based in the UK.

King’s performance marketing, HR, legal, paid UA and finance teams are also based in London. Commerce is largely situated in the city, and the shared technology team is partly in the UK too. Green describes certain teams as "co-located" across studios.

"The most important thing for us is to get the right talent working on the right problems. We found through the pandemic and also since then that we're able to get very effective work done across different locations," he explains.

"We have people in the London studio working on all of our titles - a real good combination and distribution - and then you get this very natural sharing of ideas, sharing of insights and so on across the teams."

Green adds that this cross-locational structure also helps open up more opportunities for employees, whether in London, Stockholm or elsewhere.

"We're kind of deliberately blending across different locations right now," he says.

"We felt that London was one of those cities in Europe where we could both find and also attract people in from outside to come and live and work. What we needed to build the studio here was a combination of technical talent, design talent, artistic talent, business management talent, product and production talent, and all of the things that go into making a studio," Green reflects.

"Talent’s super dispersed across the UK. Some of our sister studios or other studios in the Xbox group are in the Midlands and I’ve had the chance to go visit a number of them."

Green also travels around Europe, visiting King's studios in different regions on a regular basis. He spends "quite a lot of time" in the US, where much of Microsoft’s organisation is based.

Farming in the UK

Farm Heroes Saga remains King’s "big hit" from London, developed and launched in the city with a mobile release back in 2014. It had made $1bn by 2019.

Green was involved in the mobile launch and, considering its location, calls Farm Heroes Saga’s success "a big deal for the industry, if I may say".

But he doesn’t linger on the past. Rather, he assures that the London-based teams continue to refine and improve the title, as well as Candy Crush.

"I’m 100% convinced that they will be better in three months, better again in six months, better again in 12 months. Better in another 10, 12 years because we keep working out new ways in which to serve and surprise the players.

"Millions, hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of players around the world like casual games, so we're squarely in the absolute centre of the games industry in my view."

Green also addresses Pepper Panic Saga, another match-3 casual game developed in London, though this King title is no longer operational. Focus returns to Farm Heroes Saga, and during our visit we learn that the title has now surpassed $2bn in lifetime revenue.

Proceeding on our tour to the Farm Heroes floor, we get a glimpse of how the game’s levels are designed and how blockers are creatively implemented with varying complexity. We also meet with VP of Farm Heroes Saga Trevor Burrows, who leads the team from London.

Echoing Green, he shares that Farm Heroes Saga was originally an entirely London-based game but over time has "adapted and evolved" to include talent from other offices. A big share of the team remains in the UK, which Burrows attributes to Farm Heroes' "roots" here, but he confirms some team members work from Stockholm, Malmo and Barcelona.

"There's a very strong culture of collaboration within the team. We've learned and adapted our ways of working over time to be well equipped to make sure that we remain very well connected across various locations and ensuring there's good visibility on what's happening across the wider team even if you're not physically present in the same location," Burrows shares.

"London is a big hub for game-making and it's also an incredibly international place that attracts talent from all over the world. I think this is really incredibly valuable for us.

"We're game makers. We're making games for players from all over the world. I think it's important that we're able to capture that diversity within the team that we build and I think London is one of the very few places in the world where you really have that mix of diversity but also quality of talent."

Departments and duties

King moved into the Ampersand building in January 2016. It’s been the team’s UK base for over a decade now, complete with work spaces and creative zones - a music room and gaming area included.

Since 2020, the first floor has also been shared with Activision Blizzard’s EMEA go-to-market team. The Call of Duty maker acquired King in 2015 for $5.9bn and was itself acquired by Microsoft in 2023.

King and Activision Blizzard work largely independently inside the building, with each team maintaining its own culture and work style. Though, they can collaborate when it makes sense to do so.

We head through the atrium and over to King’s marketing team where we speak with senior director of marketing studio Sian Finnis and Candy Crush’s senior director, product marketing Roberto Kusabbi.

Finnis notes how her team, 'the marketing studio', is 90% London-based. Collaborative platform Miro is used to access project files, enabling team members to work together wherever they’re located without the need for a large physical server.

"The team is primarily based in London and I love having a day in London where everybody's here all together and we'll go and get lunch together," she says.

"We do have a few people in different offices and we've all worked through COVID together, so we're really good at interacting remotely. That’s why things like Miro are just amazing - like how we store our project files is in a very particular way so that anyone can pick them up regardless of where they are."

Finally, Kusabbi focuses specifically on Candy Crush marketing. This team is split across London, Stockholm, Malmo, Barcelona and Berlin, with various sub-teams like consumer marketing, brand and strategy, marketing intelligence and marcomms.

"All of the team here in London works together physically or remotely with other teams across Stockholm, Barcelona, Berlin, et cetera," he shares.

"We build cross-functional teams to work together. All Stars, for example, is a cross-function between four or five different teams working together on one single goal."

Overall, it's evident that King's games today are operated from all over Europe, but still London remains an important hub for much of the team.

From All Stars to Crush & Tell to fresh ambitions in the casual space, expect further behind-the-scenes details on King’s marketing teams and broader strategy soon.

King recently spoke at Pocket Gamer Connects London in January. We'll be heading to Sweden, home to the developer's co-HQ, with Pocket Gamer Connects Summit Malmö on May 27th to 28th.