The $1 billion game that says AI can’t replace human creativity

Gaming is the mega-sector few talk about. With a global market value of $386 billion this year, it dwarfs the size of film and music combined. As many as 350,000 people work in the industry directly, according to market research firm Gitnux. As with all other parts of the business world, talk of artificial intelligence is intense and inconclusive.

Microsoft is one of the Big Daddies. Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Minecraft live within the Xbox gaming empire, catapulted to leading global status by the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in 2023. Tencent, from China, and Sony, from Japan, vie with Microsoft for supremacy at the top of the gaming leaderboard.

With such a successful stable, Microsoft is keen that advertisers engage with gaming platforms, and it has set up a business division—Xbox Media Solutions—to drive profitable deals. The first game it lists on its “global portfolio of fan-favorite franchises” has nothing to do with battlefield simulations in future universes or worlds created by an endless supply of rubble, bricks, and tree trunks. The first game it highlights relies on people matching different types of sweets in a row and has a name that is part pro wrestling, part confectionery store: Candy Crush Saga.

Candy Crush was launched in 2012 with 65 “levels” of candy-matching to complete. Few would have predicted that, 14 years later, it would still be making $1 billion in annual revenue and have a fan base of over 150 million users playing it more than once a month, according to Business of Apps, which covers the sector. The number of levels now exceeds 20,000, and spinoff games include Soda Saga and Jelly Saga. Given its rabid fandom, the $5.9 billion Activision paid in 2016 for King, the company that launched the game, now looks like a steal.

What’s next for a game so successful that when writer of catchy tunes Meghan Trainor wanted an exclusive launch platform for the video of her new single “Made You Look,” she chose Candy Crush? For the answer to that, it is worth turning to Paula Ingvar, the game’s general manager, based at the company’s HQ in Stockholm. She does not lack ambition.

“Our challenge is that we want the game to be here forever,” Ingvar, who has been with the gaming firm for 11 years, tells me. Could Candy Crush be a digital version of Monopoly—the board game invented more than a century ago that is now a video and arcade phenomenon? That is certainly a significant ask in a world where a new competitor is a few lines of code away. (Matching sweets on a grid is not that complicated an idea.)

“How do we keep it interesting?” Ingvar continues. “How do we keep our audiences engaged and keep it fresh?”

It is a question asked by any number of established brands in the brutally competitive world of digital retail, where your users have a hundred different options laid out before them every day.

“Attention is the scarce commodity in the world,” Ingvar says. “So, for us, it’s about two vectors. One, the experience needs to be fun. Retention starts with joy. We want, no matter the circumstances, that when you’re playing Candy Crush you are in a better mood after you have played a round or two.

“We want people to play Candy for the rest of their lives. And that means that Candy needs to fit into their lives, not the opposite. The sustainable........

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