Candy Crush Saga’s Response to Royal Match Passing It in Sales is to…Do More Ads?

Today, we look at how Candy Crush Saga’s response to being passed by Royal Match is to…do more ads?

Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of pop culture history that interests me that doesn’t quite fit into the other features.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the mobile video game, Candy Crush Saga, the “free to play” tile-matching video game that makes a ton of money based on a small percentage of players being willing to spend money to move up the levels of the game, which become increasingly difficult in an attempt to make players pay them money to progress further.

Recently, the game made headlines when it was passed in monthly revenue and monthly downloads by a similar “free to play” “matching” mobile game, Royal Match, which is very similar to Candy Crush Saga, except that it has been around for only three years, while Candy Crush Saga has been around for a dozen years.

I used to play Candy Crush Saga a lot back in the day (Rich Johnston even did an article on my Candy Crush playing back in 2018 at Bleeding Cool), and I would even pay them a little money (my philosophy was, “If I’m enjoying the game, it’s fair enough to give them some money), but then the game started to go through the process of “enshittification,” which is when a popular company/game/device/system has become popular enough that it feels it can start making the user experience worse, as you’re sort of “pot committed.” It suddenly made it impossible to get free boosters, and they also raised their prices (and, of course, the aforementioned increased difficulty of levels, to make it harder and harder to pass without boosters or extra moves).

So I quit cold turkey, and just stopped playing for a couple of years, and then picked up again after a while, and noticed that they had made SOME improvements in terms of allowing players to get free boosters (which help you pass levels). They even started a “Royalty Program” for the better players, like me. So I started playing again, and, again, I sporadically gave them some money (not a lot). However, heading into 2023, they dropped the Royalty Program, then started making all of the free boosters that you could win MUCH worse. You know, instead of Booster X, it was now “Five minutes of Booster X.” And then it wasn’t even THAT, it was “Five minutes of a booster WORSE than Booster X.” It was clear-cut enshittification. There was a thing where you’d split X amount of gold bars with other players if you won seven levels in a row. Then it was nine levels. Then it was 12. For me, it is now FIFTEEN LEVELS. They introduced a thing where they pushed you to make “friends” with other players, and then give each other free lives that you could use when you run out of lives…and then they capped how many lives you could get each day…and then they capped how many lives you could get PERIOD. Total enshittification.

And, once again, I quit. I started playing Royal Match, which has not yet been enshittified (I’m not saying it won’t, of course, most things do eventually), and the game has been SO helpful in terms of allowing you access to helpful and free boosters. I haven’t paid for anything in the game yet. For a while there, Candy Crush Saga would even send me occasional emails asking me to come back, but they’d always be pathetic in terms of trying to convince me to return, like, “Return! You have X amount of gold left!” Yeah, I know how much gold I have, dudes.

Recently, though, I’ve been getting a deluge of ads for Candy Crush Saga when on my cellphone, and I thought today, what the heck, if they’re pushing the game this much, maybe they improved things, so I gave it a shot for the first time in about a year to see if they’ve responded to the Royal Match threat by improving the user experience on the game (do note that Candy Crush Saga still makes a ton of money every month. The game is doing fine overall), and….nope. They’ve apparently been doing a lot more ad content (you know, watch an ad for more moves), but that’s not available to every player (not available to me), but mostly, they just seem to be doing more ads FOR THE GAME everywhere, and also some ads that are clearly meant to mimic Royal Match’s ads (Royal Match stresses saving the “King,” and every 50 levels, you get a mini-game where you save him from some threat. Candy Crush has been doing ads where you have to save the Candy Crush mascot, the Yeti).

I won a whole episode on Candy Crush, and got my “winning the race” winnings, and that’s it for me. It’s so crazy that I was gladly GIVNG THEM MONEY and they still managed to drive me away by making the whole experience too shitty to continue. It’s a real shame.

But hey, Royal Match is fun, at least! For me, that is. This is not some ad for Royal Match. It just interests me that it is so much better than Candy Crush, has recently passed Candy Crush in sales, and Candy Crush’s reaction is to change…nothing. Hilariously silly.