Holy Shit Gossip Harbor Outgrossed Candy Crush Saga
Holy shit, it actually happened. Last week, Gossip Harbor generated more money than Candy Crush Saga. This is a pretty monumental moment in puzzle, and while everyone's focused on Pixel Flow, this has been a story that's been building over the last couple of years. Incredible, explosive growth.
While Match hasn't necessarily shrunk, it certainly hit equilibrium. The Innovator's Dilemma has hit all of the Match firms, as I've previously written about; they've been caught flat-footed, and the Chinese have found their opening.
The inability of these firms to even build out extension products in adjacent genres like Blast or 3D is truly puzzling (pun intended). So much time wasted by King on things like Rebel Riders and the 50 millionth attempt at a mid-core title, rather than focusing on their core competencies.
We've seen this with Krafton, which has finally retreated from throwing investment darts at the wall back to expanding the PUBG franchise. Or Zynga, which went back to Poker and Words with Friends, or Ubisoft, which had some adventures and misadventures in the tropics with Hyper Scape and blockchain. And there's CCP, which keeps thinking that EVE is also a Shooter and VR franchise.
Over and over again, we find firms that, in the words of the great Drake Maye, "Get bored being efficient." I saw this at DICE as well, where people get frustrated with working on the mainline franchises. Suddenly, the new hot game in development is a chance to escape from the corporate bureaucracy and design mandates of the last franchise.
Leaders have not done a good job of managing this. Instead, they need to sell the vision that the mainline franchise is where top-tier designers and product managers can see their vision realized, and that they can remove the barriers to making it a reality. Efficiency is not the enemy of creativity, as we saw with innovations like Super Light Ball and Lava Quest.