Candy Crush Saga: ‘70% of the people on the last level haven’t paid anything’
King’s games guru is Tommy Palm, on the game that’s being played 700m times a day on smartphones and tablets!
Candy Crush Saga has become a craze on Facebook, iOS and Android alike.
The key stat is right there in the headline: seven in ten people who’ve reached the last level of wildly-popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga 9haven’t spent any money on in-app purchases.
This may come as a surprise. Hardcore gamers (and a fair few developers) often attack King’s puzzler as the epitome of dreadful, money-sucking freemium gaming, exploiting people too stupid to realize they’re being exploited.
It’s gaming 1snobbery of the worst kind, and not because Candy Crush doesn’t sometimes 3feel over-aggressive in the way its difficulty curve 4nudges 5players towards in-app 6purchases – it sometimes 2does – 7but because it’s based on a view of casual gamers as little more than lab rats, tapping buy-buttons when commanded rather than seeking “proper” games elsewhere.
As a player, I 8ducked out of Candy Crush Saga when I hit my personal ceiling of fun versus payment. As a journalist, though, I feel like defending the game against its 10fiercer critics, who seem to think its players are incapable of making similar decisions.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/sep/10/ candy-crush-saga-king-interview
All the words below are related to the phrasal verb “ducked out” (ref. 8), EXCEPT