King Digital, best known for the wildly popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga, has had a rough couple of years. Pick up a copy of my first sci-fi novel, The Last Exodus, which is now in print and online.A game mascot on the floor of the New York stock exchange on the day King launched its IPO in 2014. I've reached out to King for comment on this piece.įollow me on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Tumblr. That's a bad precedent for the industry, and rewarding a mobile giant for the practices that make the mobile games industry at large something of a creative wasteland. But it is disappointing all the same that King is now a part of the biggest deal in gaming history when it's never had a truly original thought in its head.

It's worked for a good long while, and with the amount of revenue they bring in, I can't even say that the $5.9B valuation is necessarily crazy. King has grown fat off the ability to effective monetize classics by forcing players to pay for extra lives and to skip timegates.

(Seriously, look, like send out a search party for them). But they've never invented a truly original hit, always drawing on past puzzling icons for 'inspiration.' I don't think they're Zynga-style outright cloners, but the two companies do seem similar in many ways, and look where Zynga is now. The point I'm making is that King is very good at turning existing successful puzzle games and giving them their polished 'Saga' spin. Diamond Digger Saga is another type of SameGame, while Farm Heroes Saga and Pepper Panic Saga are more Match-3 variants. Though not identical, King's recent Scrubby Dubby Saga appears to have been directly inspired by 2005 puzzler Chuzzle, as the two play similarly.Īs for the rest? Pyramid Solitaire Saga is, unsurprisingly, based on the solitaire card game Pyramid.

Spelling out words in a grid with blocks has been Boggle's game for years now, but King made their own version with Alpha Betty as recently as this year.

Peggle's bouncing pegs have been a staple of the puzzle gaming genre for years, and King appropriated the idea for Papa Pear Saga, which plays nearly identically to the classic. In the game, players try to clear bubbles in another form of color-matching.Īnother classic puzzle genre, this time from the '80s, which King brought to present data and altered with pets. King's second most popular franchise, Bubble Witch, can directly trace its lineage to the classic Puzzle Bobble, also known as Bust-a-Move when it came to North America.

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