How Candy Crush Adjusts Difficulty and Makes Money

I reverse engineered Candy Crush to figure out how a fourteen-year-old game still

makes almost a billion dollars a year, and it's because they decide how close you

should be to winning on every single one of your moves.

I discovered that Candy Crush can calculate how close you

are to beating a level,

and in the code, they call it pass proximity.

Then they download a six hundred thousand row table to your phone, which helps them

calculate what your pass proximity should be after every single move.

Then each time you make a move, they do a check to see

if you're where they want

you to be. If you're falling behind, the game changes the odds in your favor.

In fact, on your last move, it can even drop up to fifty-six extra

candies onto the

board. But if you're playing too well, there's a road branch literally named

Harder

that tweaks the odds to make the game more difficult.

This kind of dynamic difficulty is a big reason the game can feel

challenging and

addicting to all types of audiences, but everyone will naturally lose

eventually.

So the game gives you two options to keep playing.

You can either watch an ad or you can pay, and both of them are optimized around

your pass proximity for the level.

If you watch an ad, the higher your pass proximity,

the smaller your reward.

And if you decide to pay, your pass proximity goes into their

machine learning

algorithm, along with your losing streak, whether you're low on lives, and even

your place in the weekly race to calculate how much they should give you for your

purchase. So the same number they use to keep you

playing is the one they also use

to sell you the way out. Follow me if you want to see more breakdowns like

this,

and let me know in the comments what app I should do next.