How Experimentation Grew King
Since its launch Candy Crush has made $20bn. Not everyone knows King had been trying, learning and evolving for almost ten years before that “Delicious” cascade of match 3, the saga map, first Facebook and then smartphones catapulted them to top of mobile gaming.
Of course that wasn’t the end of the story. With a sudden in-flow of cash it wasn’t clear what to do next. There were ideas everywhere: build a parallel set of levels (remember Dreamworld?), build entirely new games (the expectation was that Candy would have a similar life cycle to console and PC games at that point) or even port the game to Kindle. But which of these were likely to generate the most value, what did players really want?
Enter the Experimentation Group. Rather than building new games, they believed the answer was to go deeper into the ones that already existed. They believed the value was in understanding what players really wanted. The idea was that by taking these learnings and sharing them with the rest of the business they would create a platform on which the company could continually grow: knowledge.
Their first swing at this idea was 'Hard Level Labelling' in Pyramid Solitaire Saga, which you can read about here. To get to the point, it worked extremely well. In Pyramid itself, every King game it was added to and is now a staple across mobile gaming. The learnings from this experiment gave the team clues about what players wanted from King’s games, like context on their performance (am I doing well?) and mid and long term goals (what am I doing next?) that went on to form the basis of further valuable experiments. It’s also worth noting the accretive nature of Hard Level Labelling, it created value for every game it was added to, this is not a zero-sum, winner takes all game.
Of course not every experiment The Experimentation Group tried was successful but the team kept the hit rate up by sticking to a few key principles:
1. Every experiment had to have a clear hypothesis, ideally supported by data
2. Ship as soon as possible, in a sprint ideally.
3. Go big or go home, any result between 0 and 5% was to be avoided
Over time they built a deep understanding of what players want and a way of working that has helped King stay at the top of mobile gaming for over a decade. We believe any mobile gaming team can adopt this approach and would love to talk to you about how we can help you do it too. Just click below to get started!