Author: Pete Pachal / Source: Mashable
If you own a smartphone, chances are you know Candy Crush and maybe even the game’s latest incarnation, Candy Crush Friends Saga. What you may not know is the story behind the franchise: How an Italian entrepreneur put all his cash on the line as a co-founder of King, the company that created the game, in the early 2000s, with a big idea: re-invent gaming for the online world.
That person is Riccardo Zacconi. He’s guided the company through the many phases online gaming (desktop, Facebook, mobile, and more), taking King public and eventually selling it to gaming giant Activision Blizzard in 2015. In this episode of MashTalk, Zacconi talks about that journey, his thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg, and what the future holds for gaming now that people are starting to question all the time they’re spending on their devices playing games like, well, Candy Crush.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pete Pachal: I was reading a little bit about your background, and I think you might be the first knight we’ve had on MashTalk. Is that correct? Or at least the Italian equivalent of a knight?
Riccardo Zacconi: Yeah, that’s right.
PP: Is there a ritual when you get that?
RZ: Yeah there’s a ritual with the ambassador who basically welcomes you and gives you a cross and a few other things
How long ago did that happen?
I think it was maybe a year and a half ago. It’s kind of a secret actually, I don’t share it.
Well, congratulations, belatedly. So when did the first Candy Crush come out?
We launched it on mobile in November 2012. We started the company back in 2003.
So why did you why start King, and what were you doing before then that sort of led to that, because it was sort of a different era, Web 1.0 as we refer to it now.
We launched King in 2003, and I started the company with my co-founders who I met back in 1999. At the time we all working at a startup, a portal in Europe. We had a big investment at the time from a Swedish investor, and with about 10 million dollars back in 1999, we built a company from 20 people to 800. We ended up selling the company to Lycos, unfortunately in equity and not in cash.
And so it was a good experience, not zero money, but a good experience. I learned that companies have to be profitable, and that was very important for my thinking later on.
Still, a better exit than a lot of people had back then.
On paper, yes. It was great cause I met my co-founders then, and then after that I did online dating for a short time. We started one of the first free dating sites in Europe, and it went crazy without any marketing. Then once after having sold the company, I realized that actually there were others who are doing really well also with a paid model, and specifically match.com, and I looked into launching the first paid dating service in Europe. And instead of launching completely from scratch I joined a company called uDate. And this was back in 2002.
So post-crash.
Post crash, very healthy company, but we sold the company a few months after I joined. So from that I made some money, and I reinvested the entirety of what I made there in King, and that’s how we started.
So you invested all your own money?
Yeah, I put everything I had basically in there, and I had nothing. I lived in the flat of a friend of mine, a very good friend of mine for two and a half years. And I gave away my car, gave away my rented flat, everything.
Wow, what gave you that confidence that this was the thing to do?
There was no other option. It was a tough time to raise money. During tough times, it’s often when you have to be more creative. So we put in all our personal money to perfect the beta in 2005.
We launched on the web. At the time, the key model was download, so you would pay for a download. In our case you would pay to compete against others.
So this was sort of pre-Flash games — that was sort of like the online model at the time was like you’d have a Flash game with some ads on it.
Exactly, you would either play Flash, with an ad model behind, or you would play as a download model, but no one was actually offering games where you would compete against others, and monetize online, not just as a download.
So what were some of the titles, some of the games.
Oh we launched more than 200 games, and those games where basically one-level-only games. So Candy Crush was based on one of the games we developed at the time. So many, many years later when we moved to Facebook, and then to mobile, we took the best games we developed previously and launched those games in a different way. We called it “saga” format where you have a map, and you play with others. And we launched games on the web with Facebook first, and then in a way where you can play cross-platform, also mobile.
I’m glad you mentioned Facebook, because it seems to me they sort of changed things radically. Because that’s what we did on Facebook, honestly, if I think back to 2008-2009, roughly. You basically went to Facebook to play Farmville, Scrabble, Knighthood, and the things you guys were doing.
Yeah, so we’ve seen many platforms basically coming to market in some ways. So we were on the web, then we got disrupted suddenly by Facebook. We tried to get on Facebook, but we didn’t really try hard enough in some ways, and so at some point Zynga came up, came to the market and took away most of the users, who at the time were playing on the web, on Yahoo. And so the Yahoo games channel lost 45 percent of the users in one year, between April 2009 and 12 months later.
And that was sort of a…
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