King’s Candy Crush Solitaire: What Went Wrong?

Candy Crush Solitaire by King had its global launch on Feb 6th. Looking at the numbers nearly one month later, the game did just $600K in revenue on 4 million downloads at that time. Doesn’t seem like the result King was looking for after releasing it as the first Candy Crush-themed game in the last 6 years.

The first impression of the game is that it’s a little bit old, even though it’s brand new. It carries the signature King UI that we are used to from their Match3 puzzlers, but both the style and layout of the UI evokes a 2015 vibe. This wouldn’t be a problem if it were only visuals, but it seems the feature set is also not up to standard for the current generation of level-based puzzle games. And don’t get me started on the solitaire topic, as this is not Solitaire at all. 

The Solitaire category is driven by 2 kinds of games. The Ad monetization organic driven crowd of real Solitaire games as we all know it from the default Windows games. People still want to play it, and it has some specific rules, such as 4 slots to put each color of the deck in, ordered from the top to bottom card, a deck you can circle through, etc. This is Solitaire. Then, we have the IAP-driven games such as Solitaire Grand Harvest by Playtika or Tiki Solitaire by Scopely.

These games just use some of the Solitaire rules and visuals, but in the end, they are a uniquely designed level-based game that is very close to a match 3 puzzler with streaks, boosters, retries, wild cards, etc. This has been happening all over the real-world board games genre. For instance, SuperPlay’s Domino Dreams did the same setup to a Domino game. They created a level-based puzzler and are currently driving the whole genre of Domino games, doing more than $200K a day in revenue.  

Looking at the current state of top puzzlers, which are all following the cookie-cutter Royal Match event metagame, CC Solitaire has a much less aggressive approach. By level 50, I encountered around 2-3 events, whereas in the Royal Match events metagame, you are constantly bombarded by repeating a combo of 4 events that, once completed, reset again based on player progression. This is all done toward driving the player to play the main level saga as much as possible through the use of very short timers, real-time competing players, or event objectives that are different than the level objectives. 

This has been adopted by multiple top casual games, such as the Match Factory example in the right image. It works very well, and it doesn’t matter which core gameplay you use as long as there is a level-based progression with a fail state. CC Solitaire is missing this component, and I would guess that the team is probably hard at work to add it into the game. This brings me to another point, that it looks as if the game was rushed to the global launch. 

Looking at the boosters before the levels, the 3rd booster is still not implemented into the game, and there is no streak mechanic, which again is a staple driver of monetization pressure in current level-based puzzlers. Also, the collectible album Scopely’s Monopoly GO popularized is implemented in a very simplified state compared to the competition. It isn’t seasonal but permanent. You can’t trade additional duplicate cards with other players, and there is no overall big reward for the completion of the whole album that you would be chasing. 

Compared to competitors, and there are many, there is one major change in core gameplay, where players can store 1 extra card as another “connecting” card, instead of just linear connecting of all the cards on the board. This gives them much more tactical gameplay, where they can save this card for later when they run out of their current chain to immediately start the next one. Because of predominantly older female players, this seems like a step too far into the strategic depth direction, which makes the game much more niche, as difficulty needs to be balanced around this additional “helping” mechanic. 

All the other competitor games that are in soft launch follow the simplest version of not using this mechanic. This includes Disney Solitaire, Claire Chronicles, Grandma’s Secrets, and also the current leader, Solitaire Grand Harvest. As pointed out by fellow colleagues listening to our podcast, Tiki Solitaire introduced this mechanic only after level 200 as a new way to play the game for more advanced players. This confirms my assumption that this could be driving players off during early onboarding. 

King already started their cross-promotion machine by trying to drive downloads into the game through their portfolio. We can see the example below, where players are rewarded with a booster from Candy Crush Soda Saga if they download CC Solitaire. The game is still pulling solid 60K downloads a day, which is 3 times more than Grand Harvest does currently, but based on its current metrics, this still won’t be enough, and the market will just get worse when all of these other brand new Solitaire games global launch. 

Each of the companies competing won’t have an easy time grabbing market share from Playtika, except for the fact that 2 of these games are owned by Playtika itself. My bet is still on SuperPlay’s Disney Solitaire to be the most successful new Solitaire title because of the great template it brought from Domino Dreams and data it will be receiving from the genre leader and its owner, Playtika.