This interview comes from a conversation with Todd Green, the GM of the Candy Crush Franchise. Todd has been with King for 11 years, and took over Candy Crush Saga in 2015. Prior to that he worked on Farm Heroes Saga and Pepper Panic Saga for King; having transitioned to gaming from TV, where he helped define the digital experiences for X Factor and American / [Country] Idol among others for Fremantle.
Some background on Candy Crush Saga and the Candy Crush Franchise
Candy Crush Saga is almost too big for most of us to contemplate having famously ‘made grannies gamers’:
- It is a free to play game that is primarily played on mobile devices
- It’s the top franchise in King’s stable: by 2022 over 3 billion people had installed it on their devices
- It’s considered one of the most successful freemium models in the world: according to Harvard Business School only 3-4% of players pay, but those who do spend on average $17 per month inside the game.
- As of September 2023 the Candy Crush Franchise as a whole had hit $20bn in lifetime revenue
- King was acquired by Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn in 2016; in turn acquired by Microsoft in 2023 for $68.7bn
Todd talks to us about
In this interview Todd shares
- How he got the role and his instincts about the game’s potential
- How he thinks about growth at scale
- The importance of activity and usage signals of value
- The freemium model: and thinking long term about value, user motivations and mission
- How he approaches strategy
- How he builds high performance organisations and what he focuses on as a GM
If you’re interested in optimising for user engagement signals, managing assets for the long term, how to double down on a standout and how to build high performing organisations, this one is for you.
Introduction to Todd Green, covering pivotal moments in his career
My name is Todd Green and I’m the general manager for the Candy Crush Franchise.
I’ve been working at King for almost 11 years now in various different roles, but almost all the time I’ve been there I’ve been working on making and trying to make games better.
Right now I’m working specifically on two games. One is called Candy Crush Saga. That’s the original game in the franchise that became a mega hit. I’m also working on Candy Crush Soda Saga, which is the first of the sister games that we released after Candy Crush Saga, and which is still going very strong today.
What got you to where you are now, what were the pivotal moments?
A lot of luck and having the chance to work with lots of very skillful people has been the two most important factors.
First pivotal moment in Todd’s career: joining King at the right time
I studied History at university and that (obviously!) led me into working in TV. I worked in TV for seven or eight years, mostly working in R&D, making up new types of games and game shows. That got me more and more interested in making as well as playing them.
Part of my job at the TV company had been to look at the games market. I could see that games was really taking off. We even acquired a games company making casual games, so I was already quite aware of King before I joined.
When the opportunity came up to join King in late 2012, who were opening an office in London, I jumped at the chance. King looked to me like a company that was really going places.
Luckily they were looking for somebody who had the same sort of background that I had. During my time in TV I had worked in a very small R&D team. We would write all the models, do the design of the games, work with contractors to build them, run the day-to-day operations, and try to figure out how to market them.
King at that time was a much smaller company, so at that time it was really important for everybody who was joining to roll up their sleeves and be able to work across a number of different topics. That’s sort of analogous to product management.
I joined at the beginning of 2013. I think I applied the month before Candy Crush Saga went out on mobile, which was a massive inflection point for the company and maybe for the industry as a whole, as it brought a lot of new people into playing games.
So that was one critical moment in my career, which was joining the right company at the right time. I was very lucky. On the one hand it was very deliberate for me to go into a growing industry, which games really were at the time. TV was really not growing at that time, since this was the pre-streaming era. So one part was deliberate, but of course, you know, it really was tremendous luck joining King rather than any other company right at that time when we were about to go into this hypergrowth phase.
When I joined we suddenly started hiring and expanding our team at speed. I think I did hundreds of interviews in my first year. We were also shipping games as quickly as we could, improving games as fast as we could, trying to put the company together with our bare hands, pretty much.
Second pivotal moment: applying to take over Candy Crush Saga
Second thing, having the opportunity to, or taking the opportunity to put my name forward for taking over Candy Crush Saga in 2015.
I was by a long way not the favourite to get the job, which was based in Sweden, with a mission to get Candy Crush Saga back to growth. Additionally we had just bought our first house in the UK, and we had our first baby one week before the applications opened, literally one week.
On top of that I was actually trying to get a different job, which was a job that I thought was going to come up in the next 6 to 12 months in London. But I figured if I put my name in, then at least I would have a better chance of being considered when the job came up in London.
Then very much to my surprise and to my wife’s surprise, I kept getting through the interview rounds.
At the time that it launched, Candy Crush Saga had a gigantic peak in 2012, 2013, even into the beginning of 2014. It had become this worldwide phenomenon. I think one in three people in Hong Kong were playing it every day. It was an absolutely amazing worldwide success.
Of course that doesn’t sustain itself. It doesn’t last forever.
Now we’re actually back up to those levels; we’ve been hitting some all time peaks in the last year or so. But when I took it over back in 2015, the game was coming down a bit.
At the time, I think most people in King and most people in the industry thought that the path to success with mobile games might be similar to console and PC games at that time, where you launch a new game and then you market it, it finds its core audience, and then it will lose popularity and come down, and then you launch the next one the next year, and the next one the next year. That’s why you would have something like FIFA 2000, FIFA 2001, FIFA 2002, for example. So we thought maybe mobile was going to be like that.
But what really struck me when I was just working at King, before I was working on Candy Crush Saga, was that there were these really unusual properties of Candy Crush Saga.
Not only that it had become this massive phenomenon, brand name recognition was very high, people seemed to really love and engage with the game on a mass scale. But also looking at the metrics, the metrics were just crazy. Long-term retention was going up and up and up and up over the first year, which is a metric that normally you would expect to come down over time.
At that time with most products, assuming that you found your core audience at the beginning, over time those people would maybe become less keen and retention would go down. That’s how most games had been working, whereas with Candy Crush Saga, we were seeing long term retention going up.
We were improving the product, of course, but it seemed to be getting better and better and finding an increasingly keen and large audience. So it was breaking the rules that we would normally expect.
Having worked in a big TV company before, I’d come across one show that had the same properties, which was a show called American Idol. Then that became Pop Idol, which went all around the world. But specifically the US version had opened up these massive new industries, created this huge business and had set the template for all the talent shows that we now see 20 years later.
I’d never really worked directly on American Idol, just done tiny little bits of work on the side. But this seemed to me to be the right analogy to understand Candy Crush Saga: that it was the show that was breaking the rules and doing very unusual things that were 10X different to the other products that we were seeing in the market.
The bet that I wanted to make, or felt we should make as a company, in Candy Crush Saga was to treat it as a phenomenon and assume that it could be a huge thing in the long term. My bet was that maybe it was going to be the biggest game we had forever, rather than assuming that things would play out the way that most of us expected, which is you’re in a replacement business and you should move everything onto the new games.
So I was extremely keen to go and work on Candy Crush Saga because I felt like the live games, not the new games were the future. It wasn’t only me that had this idea; I found some great collaborators to work on that topic, but that was my pitch for the role, that we had misunderstand the product and that it was going to be the biggest thing we ever had, because if we did a good job here, it would turn out like American Idol.
In the end, my boss, who’s the same boss I have to this day, took a big risk, and put a big bet on me to take over Candy Crush Saga. That was a huge moment where I got lucky to be trusted with that job. I’m happy that I put my name in the ring, even though I never really expected to get it.
I think one of the things that helped me to get it was probably that I was seeing this as the number one most important thing rather than maybe our third or fourth priority. At least I was very enthusiastic.
When we eventually got Candy Crush Saga back to growth I wanted to move back to the UK to be closer to family. So I came back to the UK in 2017 and took over the London studio. That was a bit of a turnaround job, a lot of really good people, but the set up needed some fresh ideas. We had a really good management team in London that was able to turn the studio around, so then I went back to Sweden at the beginning of 2020 to take over Candy Crush Saga again, and then a year or so ago, as a team we got the chance to additionally work on Candy Crush Soda Saga.
Lots has happened in those last four years, I guess. We managed to get Candy Crush Saga back to growth and King has just been acquired by Microsoft.
That’s an amazing story of how joining one company at the right time can lead to so many different experiences and so many different types of jobs.
King is a company with lots of very talented people and some amazing products, which makes all the difference in the world to me.. It’s been a great place for me to work.
How do you think about a game like Candy Crush Saga? How much growth is enough growth? When do you top out? Is it when every human being on the planet spends an hour a day on Candy Crush Saga?
Okay, so how much growth is in that growth? We’re very far away from everybody on the planet playing the game, even if we’ve had a lot of people installing the games that we have.
Candy Crush Saga is 11 years old, Candy Crush Soda Saga is nearly 10 years old, Farm Heroes Saga, which is one of the first games I worked on at King, is 10 years old next year. Over that time we’ve had lots and lots and lots of sign ups. I don’t know what the public numbers are but it’s in the billions for sure.
We measure whether we’re succeeding or not in two ways. It’s quite simple. We look at the reach and we look at the revenue. So the reach is: “Are we entertaining and engaging people?” But the revenue is also: “Are we entertaining and engaging people?”
You can access the games, you can play for years and years without spending money or watching any ads. So why does anybody spend money or watch ads? It’s because there’s something on the other side of the ad or purchase that they really want and that they feel will enhance their experience. That can be a booster, like a power-up that helps you pass a level. It can be some extra moves when you run out of moves and you really want to beat that level to get to the next one. It can be some extra lives, which is a sort of time based currency in the game.
We also see that when people spend money in the games or watch ads, that’s a way for us to understand whether we’re doing a good job because it’s voluntary. You only do it if you really want what you get in return.
Coming back to how much growth is enough growth? Well, it would probably be bigger than most people imagine. There’s a lot of people playing but there’s still so many people out there who play games, who aren’t playing our games right now.
One thing which mobile games have helped to do is to massively expand the population of so-called “gamers”. A lot of people who play Candy Crush Saga or Candy Crush Soda Saga or Farm Heroes Saga every day wouldn’t describe themselves as gamers, but they play games every day. There’s a gigantic audience out there, and we’re hoping to reach more of them each year.
Focusing on engagement
You were talking about how you allocate your resources in terms of putting your bets down on existing products or on future products. How do you know that you’re making enough difference by choosing to optimise an existing product as opposed to making incremental difference? How did you define input metrics that gave you a reasonable degree of confidence?
In the end, if you’re thinking long term the reach and retention and engagement metrics matter a lot more than current transactions. If we don’t care about that, then we’ve got a problem.
Candy Crush Saga is very different to a lot of other products; and definitely very different to utility products. If I have a app where I can put my gas metre reading in, if I’m running a product team that is building this kind of app, I want it to be super smooth, really fast, really snappy, extremely clear, big boxes, big keypad that you can put the reading in easily. Maybe I want to add some help around which of the numbers on the metre I am supposed to put in. You want to try to make it super simple.
If you and I are working together on the Amazon checkout experience, it’s all about removing steps, removing friction, making it speedy. What we’re not trying to do is to get you to spend lots of time in the checkout process or submitting your gas metre reading; and for you to enjoy it and find the fun in the experience. It’s a totally different way of thinking about it.
A lot of product management literature, in my view, is written with the idea that what one is trying to do is do an extremely snappy, clean and elegant job in getting the customer from A to B.
We’re trying to do the opposite. We’re trying to build the Rio carnival. It needs to be fun. You want to spend time there. We want you to spend a bit more time there tomorrow than you did today because we gave you something cool to do, and some fun challenges to solve, as a reward for your time.
So it’s the complete opposite to the utility product approach. We’re trying to get you to spend more time. We also have another difference, which is we’re trying to do something almost alchemical, which is to make something fun. How on earth do we do that? We can only look at the output metrics and use a bit of our judgement.
Tracking usage metrics
So the metrics we look at: of course, we look at how many people we have playing the games each day. You can play the game for free forever. Some people who have been playing for 10 years, have never spent any money, never watched an advert or anything like that. That’s fine, that’s built into the model. That’s how we build a big audience.
Some people play more than once a day because often our products are fitting into little gaps in time when you’re waiting for the bus or you’re sitting outside school waiting for the kids, things like that.
Then within usage metrics, we try to make sure that you get a concentrated amount of fun. If you’re opening a product like ours and spending a lot of time clicking away communication messages or you’re getting stuck between playing levels, that’s not as much fun as actually playing the levels, which is the main place people want to spend time. When you tap on the Candy Crush Saga app or the Candy Crush Soda Saga app icon, you’re not doing it to look through lots of pop-ups, you’re doing it to play the games.
Within session metrics we’re looking at how much game time you’re having. Then within the game time, we want you to have enough variety to make the experience interesting. Variety comes in many different forms, different things on the board or different challenges to complete around the levels. But one way to think about it also is the difficulty level. If the game is too hard, that’s not fun. You get stuck for weeks and weeks, boring. But if the game is too easy, that’s also boring. There’s no challenge. If you play any game on God mode where you can just do everything, that’s also a bit boring.
There needs to be a tension. Sometimes you have to fail as well. That means that fun is not always the same as giving you success and rewards, sometimes fun can also be a bit of tension and challenge.
So those are some of the specific differences in the way that we think about the games and what are the metrics that we’re looking at, also what are the experiences that we’re trying to deliver to players in the minutes that we have a day.
Pricing models & free to play
That raises about the freemium model, which is one of those hotly debated topics when it comes to monetisation strategy. What are the trade-offs that you make and how you think about the freemium model when it comes to balancing revenue versus customer acquisition costs? How do you manage the costs of supporting many, many free users for multiple years?
Marginal cost to serve content
I think there’s still quite a bit of space in casual games for experimentation with different business models to freemium. But we have found that it comes back to thinking very long term. We have some people who will spend a dollar or two in one of our games today, who may have played for five years or more before they ever spent any money or ever watched an ad.
That means that we need to go quite wide and have a very broadly accessible model which is why the freemium model works really well for us. Anybody can come in, can pick it up and play in 10 seconds. Maybe at some point in the future, you will choose to spend money or maybe not. That’s also fine.
The marginal cost for us of serving another player is just tiny, absolutely tiny, so it’s totally fine for us. We’re not super worried if we have players who never spend or don’t spend for several years. It’s completely fine.
But we do need to provide for those long life cycles. We have more than 16,000 levels in Candy Crush Saga today, believe it or not. So it’s not like we need to slow anybody down. They’re not going to run out of levels unless you’re a really, really advanced player. We want people to play as much as they want to do. That’s the first thing.
User motivations
The second is that it’s quite challenging for us to do a demographic segmentation like a lot of other products would do. I think the stereotype is to write up a demographically based persona and say that this product is for middle-aged women in the US or something like that. We have some middle-aged women in the US who play the game but we also have every other demographic around the world playing at all different ages, in all different places, and in all different conditions.
When we think about segmenting our audience, we often think about it in terms of motivations. Are you picking up the game because you want to have a quiet solo experience? Are you playing the game because you want to connect with your friends or family, somebody else who plays the game? Are you doing it because you want to have the challenge of beating the level or beating other people in a competitive format? When we’re trying to design new experiences or improve old experiences in the game, we’re looking to serve those motivations better.
Mission
Our mission is to make the world playful. For us it’s more important to try to reach a very wide audience than it is to scrape pennies. We think that games are a good thing in the world and we try to serve the need that people have to play.
Our games are deliberately designed to be very mass mainstream accessible. To be able to pick it up and play it without being a serious gamer or somebody who’s mastered lots of fine touch controls. Going very broad with the model we have has worked for us, but that can be different for different industries and different models.
Strategy
Can I ask you some questions about product strategy? How do you think strategy operates in the product context? Do you think it’s important or not important? Do you have a playbook you apply?
I think it’s very important because it forces you to think really hard about what are the things that you’re really good at and what things you’re not very good at. What are the competitors good at and not good at? How do you think the market is going to evolve? Where are we trying to get to, what’s the winning position and the next big chapter that we’re trying to write?
The work of figuring out where we are trying to get to forces us to take into account all of these different dynamic and somewhat complex factors, and then try to pick a path. Okay, I think this is what is the one, two, three most important things that are gonna work best for us.
I do think it’s critical and there have been a couple of times for me personally where making deliberate choice to do A instead of B has either paid off really well or been a total disaster.
The idea that I just described that maybe we’re wrong about the winning formula in mobile games is all about shipping new game after new game after new game every year, what if that was actually the winning formula? There would be a massive amount of choice: tens of thousands of available games that you could get for free in an instant. What if that is too much choice and creates a sort of paralysis so that most players, most normal players who aren’t industry experts or keen on flipping over the whole time, just stick with something that’s really good for quite a long time instead of playing a different game every day.
That’s the kind of strategy choice that I’m most interested in or have found most impactful, where you think really hard about the set of problems you’re trying to solve, think really hard about what the company is good at or not good at, and then try to figure out, okay, well, what do we believe to be true? And what would we do? What are we going to do as a result?
Does the gaming industry have quirks that you need to factor into your strategies?
There are some unusual characteristics of games. However the realisation I have is that games isn’t actually that different to a lot of other industries. One of the mistakes which people inside and outside the industry sometimes make is to see games as this unusual island where normal rules do not apply.
What we try to do, both in strategy and in general, in communication and in thinking through problems, is to try to bring in ideas and examples from other domains, very deliberately, so that we don’t just look at our own industry and see what the two or three other really big games companies in mobile are doing. Instead we say, right, well, what is this [very different] company doing? What is that company doing?
Building organisations
How do you hire the right people and motivate the right people to think in this way?
Often the critical decisions in my professional life are hiring decisions. The single most important decisions that I make in any year are finding the right people to work with and then trying to create an environment in which really good people can flourish and develop and contribute and create.
If there’s any kind of agency in my role it’s making the right decisions around bringing people into the team. That’s difficult, but has a massively positive impact if you get it right.
I used to be totally consumed with building and improving products. That was the systemic foundation of how I approached challenges. How on earth do we do this? What works well in this model? What can we take from elsewhere? What can we invent for ourselves? What are the key things? I was completely focused on the products.
When I made the change from my previous role to taking over Candy Crush Saga, moving from the UK and going to Sweden for the first time, I realised that the biggest team I’d ever run before was 6 people, and now I’ve suddenly taken over this team of around 60 people. Okay, so everything I’ve learned in the past is not going to work anymore. I’m going to need to do lots of things differently. I don’t know what they are, let’s try and figure it out.
But I quickly realised that the intense focus and interest that I had on building and improving products, I could apply just as well to building and improving organisations.
Building organisations is a deep and complex and interesting and very dynamic set of problems. In a way it’s much more rewarding than building products because other people give you a lot more back than an inert piece of software.
What have I learned so far? This is rather like a craft, I think. It’s a deep and probably infinite well into which one could plunge. There’s so much to learn and so much that I will never realistically learn or get good at. But a few of the things that I’ve learned I try to keep in mind.
Hiring the right person
The first one is if you can hire effectively, which in itself is a hard thing to do, you always get very positively surprised. There’s often some vision involved in finding the right person, maybe they don’t have all of the skills in place, or maybe they are a bit weaker on A, B or C. But if you can find somebody who has the right starting point and, and you’re able to give them a network of great support, and set the right level of challenge for them, then you can see people grow tremendously fast.
In general I’m an optimist about finding somebody and putting them in a role with the right support. That makes me a great believer in what other people can do.
Multi disciplinary teams
The second thing is the more time I spend at work, the more I realise what I don’t know. It doesn’t take very long after you realise that to think, oh my goodness, there are these other people out here that are just fantastic at these things that I’m totally rubbish at.
One of the main things I keep in mind when building teams is to try and get all the critical disciplines and sets of experience that we need around the same small table, in order to solve the problem that we’ve got.
When we’re making software my leadership teams normally look pretty much the same: product person, tech person, creative person, people, team, marketing, and then someone working with strategy and operations. That’s not necessarily the ideal structure for everybody, but we have several hundred people in our teams and so we need to think hard about how the organisation can run. It doesn’t just do that by itself.
Starting from the problem and working backwards to the skillsets
The third thing that has probably been my default when I was thinking about rebuilding or when a team or a product was going into a new phase was to start with, okay, here are the existing people that we have, how do we remix? How do we remix to make it work? That has sometimes led me down the wrong path where I’ve tried to force fit people into the new team. I really think this person could do a great job. Maybe they can do it. This is a bit different to what they’ve been experienced in and not quite what we need, but it will probably be okay. Let’s see.
I try to do it the other way around now. What is the problem we’re trying to solve? What’s the plan for getting there? What are the sets of skills that we need? Then I condense those into roles, and then start to look at who are the best people to fit into these different roles?
That’s been helpful for me, but also has meant that I’ve been much less likely to put people into roles which are maybe not quite what they want or where their passion or interest is. If you start with a problem to solve and work backwards, normally that helps with building really high performing teams where people feel that This is the right place for me to be. This is what I want to do. I’ve got the right environment around me.
Todd’s role in the organisation
Right now I’m spending more time on storytelling, on simplifying, on repetition using new ways of talking about the topic, on organisational problem solving. That’s much more the world I’m working in now. At some point I’d love to go back to a smaller organisation again and be hands on the product.
But we have hundreds of people in the teams I’m running now and that’s not the place where I am or where I should be spending my time, even if that’s sometimes my interest. I need to focus on the things that only the person in the GM role can do because of the design of the system.
Stuff lands on my table that only I can deliver. It has to be the person in this role that makes that decision. I try to just do that. And if I can do that, then I’m playing my part in the organisation much better than if I’m running around left right or left right. Oh, please let me into that meeting. Oh, I’ve got some great ideas about what we should do, what we should do here. It does happen sometimes, but that’s not the best way I can serve the rest of the team.
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Currently GM of the Candy Crush Franchise and member of the leadership team at King, Todd Green joined King in 2013 in the UK working on Farm Heroes Saga and Pepper Panic Saga before moving to Sweden in 2015 to take over Candy Crush Saga. He currently focuses on creating the most engaging possible experience for players of mobile games, by building effective organisations. Todd is a veteran of gaming, even to the extent of serving on BAFTA’s Gaming Committee. He occasionally lectures on the topic.
