case: Candy Crush iPhone 5 Case

From Solitaire and Mahjong to Tetris and Puzzle Bobble, gamers have long enjoyed tile-matching games. There is something innately cathartic in the act of arranging game pieces together to make them disappear, providing an immediate sense of accomplishment to the player. In 2001, PopCap Games took this mechanic to a new level with their browser game Bejeweled, with players swapping colorful jewels to form vertical or horizontal chains of three or more gems. This popularized the modern concept of match-three games, one of the most often-played puzzle sub-genres. In 2012, Swedish game designer King attempted to capitalize on the success of these games, and in doing so created a new standard for popular mobile games.

In Candy Crush Saga, players travel through the lush, colorful landscape of the Candy Kingdom, advancing from level to level by matching brightly-wrapped candies to earn points. Each board contains a specific challenge, such as clearing a certain number of candies in a limited time frame or in a certain number of moves, or bringing candy ingredients down to the bottom of the board. Special matches, such as placing four or five candies in a row, produce power-ups that allow players to clear massive amounts of candies in one move. Successfully completing a level opens the next sequential space on the game����_��s map. Failure leads the player to lose one of five lives, and once all lives are lost, the player must wait a certain period of time for lives to regenerate.

Candy Crush Saga is perhaps best known for being one of the first successful games based on the free-to-play, or freemium, model. The game itself is completely free to download, and there are no paywalls to stop players from progressing. Instead, players have the option of completing micro-transactions and purchasing extra power-ups to use on tricky levels, or more lives to avoid waiting for them to regenerate. At the height of the game����_��s popularity, King earned nearly $1 million a day from these in-app purchases. While some players appreciate the extra, voluntary assistance, others derisively call this style of game ����_�pay-to-win,����_�_ especially at upper levels where the difficulty can reach epic proportions and special items seem necessary.

Though originally designed as a Facebook-based browser game, the popularity of Candy Crush Saga led King to quickly develop mobile versions for Android and iOS, ensuring that players could sync both accounts and pick up wherever they left off. This mobility boosted the games ratings even more, as it immediately became popular with the ����_�casual����_�_ gaming market. These players specifically enjoy games they can pick up anywhere, play for bite-sized chunks of time, and then put away, only to pick up right where they left of later. Due to their dominance in the casual gaming market, women make up more than 58% of all Candy Crush Saga players.

With more than 2.73 billion downloads, Candy Crush Saga is still considered the most downloaded app from the Apple App Store, and it has earned an estimated $3.91 billion. At its height, it boasted 293 million active players. King has also released three spin-off titles: Candy Crush Soda Saga (2014), Candy Crush Jelly Saga (2015), and Candy Crush Friends (2018), all of which follow the same basic match-three pattern of the original. In 2017, CBS aired a short-lived game show hosted by Mario Lopez, with teams competing in Candy Crush-themed challenges such as relay races, mazes, and dexterity puzzles.

Though a seemingly-late edition to the puzzle game scene, Candy Crush Saga created a unique phenomenon by combining traditional tile-matching elements with mobile technology and the emerging free-to-play distribution model, taking the casual gaming demographic by storm and creating a high demand for similar game development that continues to dominate the mobile industry.