Did Candy Crush Saga Tip You?
Around a year ago, one of the most popular games (if not the most popular game) was Candy Crush Saga. This game does not have crazy graphics like Battlefield4 or Crysis or a very frustrating flying bird, but it still somehow became such a craze. In case you are not familiar with the game, it is very similar to Bejeweled, but changed things up by replacing jewels with candies, added a limited number of lives and added networking. As a small title and mobile game, Candy Crush Saga would not survive without users. One, it would just be covered over by the millions of other apps and second, there would not be a way to make revenue without users. The game first needed to surpass the tipping point needed for the product to survive. This it did with two main factors: free and social networking.
Candy Crush Saga started out as a free Facebook Flash game. Free is almost always good; everyone wants free stuff and if a game is free, what is the harm in trying it out? King used this to attract initial users on Facebook and then later on the mobile app stores. For the company, selling it for free is not too expensive. Although there were investments put into creating the game, it is nothing compared to pharmaceutical products that took millions (if not billions) of dollars to create and are therefore expensive. The free factor was the initial step in making the game a hit; it allowed the game to gain its needed initial adopters.
But then again, a lot of the apps on the mobile and web stores are free. So what made Candy Crush Saga stand out? The answer is that the game wanted you to have friends playing it. Since it started out as a game on the Facebook store, it has ever since been deeply intertwined with Facebook; you log in with a Facebook account, you can see your Facebook friends who play it, and most importantly, you are encouraged to have as many Facebook friends as you can play the game. Inside the game, you need friends to help you advance to the next “region” of the game and friends to help give you lives so you do not have to wait for lives to regenerate. This promotes the spread of the game because then people start sending “help” requests to their friends, who may or may not be playing the game already. More and more people learn of the existence of the game and then upon seeing the “Free” tag, they are more willing to test it out and get addicted.
This strategy of King was very effective in making their game a success. Other companies have also used this idea in order to make their products more appealing. For example, Apple created iMessage which is free and exclusive to Apple product users. Dropbox is free and promotes users to invite their friends by giving rewards in the form of additional free storage space. These examples all have something in common: they are all software. In general, software is less expensive to develop and therefore can be offered at lower prices. This makes surpassing the tipping point a lot easier for software companies. Because of this, more and more hardware companies are going bankrupt and it is a lot harder for hardware startups because of the high overhead and a high minimum sales price. This also affects the entire job market; more and more students are selecting computer science and information technology as their major.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2013/11/19/candy-crush-lessons/