Yes, and by a wide margin. In a press release dated September 27, 2023 marking its 20th anniversary, King stated that the Candy Crush franchise had been the top grossing game franchise in the United States app stores for six years in a row, had delivered more than $20 billion in revenue life to date, and had passed five billion downloads life to date. Candy Crush Saga launched on Facebook on April 12, 2012 and on iOS and Android on November 14, 2012. Its developer, King, was bought by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion on February 23, 2016, and became part of Microsoft when Microsoft closed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard on October 13, 2023. What happened to Candy Crush is not decline. It is that a game can stop being a conversation and keep being a business, and almost nothing in the way we talk about games can tell those two things apart.
A Note on Numbers Before We Start
There is a great deal of Candy Crush data on the internet and most of it is estimated by third party analytics firms that measure app store activity from the outside. Monthly player counts in particular circulate constantly with no company attached to them.
This page prints figures only where a company that owns the game published them, and it names the release and the period. Where we could not find a company source, we say so instead of guessing. That rules out most of the player count claims you will see elsewhere, including the ones that sound authoritative.
The Timeline, With Owners
Candy Crush has had three corporate parents in ten years, which is unusual and matters for how the game is run today.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| April 12, 2012 | Candy Crush Saga launches on Facebook |
| November 14, 2012 | Launches on iOS and Android |
| March 26, 2014 | King Digital Entertainment goes public on the New York Stock Exchange |
| November 2, 2015 | Activision Blizzard announces it will acquire King for $5.9 billion |
| February 23, 2016 | Acquisition completes at $18.00 in cash per share |
| October 13, 2023 | Microsoft completes its acquisition of Activision Blizzard |
| July 2025 | Microsoft’s games division layoffs reach King |
Activision Blizzard’s completion announcement of February 23, 2016, read September 8, 2026, states the terms and describes the combined company as the largest game network in the world with over 500 million users. Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard was announced on January 18, 2022 at a stated value of $68.7 billion and closed on October 13, 2023 after a regulatory fight that ran nearly two years.
The Facebook Game That Left Facebook in Time
Candy Crush Saga is usually filed with FarmVille and the Facebook game boom, and for its first seven months that is exactly what it was.
The difference is the seven months. It launched on Facebook in April 2012 and on phones in November 2012, and the mobile version is the one that became the business. King made the platform jump early, before Facebook’s game canvas began its long decline, and it built the mobile version so that a player’s progress carried between the two.
That single decision separates it from most of its contemporaries. The social game companies that treated Facebook as the destination rather than as a distribution channel inherited every subsequent decision Facebook made about its platform, and the graveyard of products built on somebody else’s login is large enough to have its own history, which we lay out in dead social media platforms. The parallel effort to build rival social platforms for those apps to live on failed for related reasons, and we cover that in failed Facebook alternatives.
King got out in time. That is most of the story.
Is Candy Crush Still Popular? Why You Think Nobody Plays It
The gap between what people assume about Candy Crush and what King reports is the most interesting thing about this subject. Four reasons for it.
Its players are not the people who talk about games online. The audience skews older, skews away from gaming forums and social video, and does not post about it. A game with no discourse reads as a game with no players, which is an error of measurement, not of fact.
Nothing about it generates news. There is no sequel cycle, no console launch, no controversy engine. King runs the same game with new levels, and a product that ships continuously produces no events for anyone to report.
Free to play economics do not need everybody. In this business model the revenue concentrates in a small share of players. That means the top grossing chart position and the size of the cultural footprint are only loosely related, which is why a game nobody discusses can sit at the top of the revenue list for years.
It is not on your phone, so you assume it is not on anyone’s. Almost every reader arriving at this question deleted the app around 2015 and has had no exposure since.
The mirror image of this is worth holding next to it. There are products that had enormous cultural presence and could not convert it into a business at all, which is the whole of the story in what happened to Vine. Candy Crush is the opposite failure of intuition: revenue without conversation.
What King Has Actually Said
The most substantive published figures come from King’s own 20th anniversary release, issued September 27, 2023 on Business Wire and read September 8, 2026. As of that release:
- The Candy Crush franchise had been the top grossing game franchise in the United States app stores for six years in a row.
- The franchise had delivered more than $20 billion in revenue life to date.
- The franchise had passed five billion downloads life to date.
- Candy Crush Saga had reached level 15,000.
Two things to note about how to read that. “Life to date” means cumulative since launch, not annual. And “top grossing in the United States app stores” is a ranking of consumer spending on iOS and Android in one country, not a global measure of anything.
Activision Blizzard reported similar streak figures in its quarterly results while it owned King, including that Candy Crush was the top grossing franchise in United States app stores for the twenty second consecutive quarter as of its fourth quarter 2022 results.
We did not find a monthly active player figure for Candy Crush published by King, Activision Blizzard or Microsoft covering any period after 2023, and this page therefore does not print one. Microsoft does not break out King’s results separately in its financial reporting, which is why current, sourced numbers for this game are genuinely hard to obtain.
The Level Treadmill Is the Product
The design question people ask about Candy Crush is why it never ends. The answer is that not ending is the entire commercial mechanism.
Candy Crush Saga adds levels continuously, and it passed 15,000 of them by 2023. There is no completion state, no ending screen and no reason to stop other than losing interest. Combined with a lives system that meters how much you can play at once, and optional purchases that remove that meter, this produces a product with no natural churn point.
That is a fundamentally different structure from a mobile game built around a finite experience, and it is the reason the two dominant mobile franchises of 2012 had such different fates. Rovio had to rebuild its business around characters, film and licensing when its finite level packs stopped selling, which is what we set out in what happened to Angry Birds. King never faced that problem because it never shipped a finished product.
What Has Genuinely Changed
Two real changes, both on the corporate side rather than in the game.
King is now a Microsoft studio, and it has been cut. In July 2025 Microsoft carried out layoffs across its games division. Reporting at the time, including from PocketGamer.biz, read September 8, 2026, put the reduction at King at around 200 roles, roughly a tenth of its staff, with cuts to level design, user research and the Farm Heroes Saga team. Microsoft’s public statement described organizational and workforce changes to position teams for a dynamic marketplace. Subsequent reporting has covered allegations from affected staff about the role of internal tooling in those decisions; those are reported claims by named outlets rather than company statements, and we present them as such.
The corporate distance from the player has grown. In 2012 Candy Crush was made by an independent Stockholm and London company. It is now a product line inside the games division of one of the largest companies in the world. Nothing about that is visible when you open the app, and that is precisely the point.
FAQ
Is Candy Crush still popular in 2026?
By the measure its owners publish, yes. King stated in its September 27, 2023 anniversary release that the Candy Crush franchise had been the top grossing game franchise in United States app stores for six years running, with more than $20 billion in lifetime revenue and over five billion lifetime downloads. Microsoft does not report King’s results separately, so no more recent official figure was available to us.
How many people play Candy Crush?
We could not find a player count published by King, Activision Blizzard or Microsoft for any period after 2023, so this page does not state one. Player numbers circulating online are typically third party estimates derived from app store activity rather than company reported figures.
Who owns Candy Crush now?
Microsoft. King was acquired by Activision Blizzard on February 23, 2016 for $5.9 billion, and Microsoft completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard on October 13, 2023.
When did Candy Crush come out?
Candy Crush Saga launched on Facebook on April 12, 2012 and on iOS and Android on November 14, 2012. The mobile version is what turned it into a long term business.
How much money has Candy Crush made?
King stated in September 2023 that the franchise had delivered more than $20 billion in revenue life to date. That is a cumulative figure since 2012, not an annual one, and it covers the franchise rather than Candy Crush Saga alone.
Why does Candy Crush never end?
Because a finite game has a completion point and a completion point is a reason to stop paying. Candy Crush Saga adds levels continuously and had passed 15,000 of them by 2023, which removes any natural end to the product.
The Short Version
- It did not decline. It stopped being discussed, which is a different thing.
- King’s own September 27, 2023 release: top grossing US franchise six years running, more than $20 billion lifetime revenue, over five billion lifetime downloads.
- Launched April 12, 2012 on Facebook, November 14, 2012 on phones, and the early mobile move is why it survived.
- Three owners: King, then Activision Blizzard from February 23, 2016, then Microsoft from October 13, 2023.
- No current player count exists from any owner, so this page does not print one.
- July 2025: Microsoft’s games division layoffs reached King, reported at around 200 roles.
