When some people strike gold in the entertainment industry, they decide to just ride it out and enjoy their profits for the rest of their lives – while others can never seem to relax with what they’ve achieved, and always want to create even more. Tommy Palm helped create one of the most popular video games in mobile gaming – “Candy Crush Saga” – and while many in his position would be happy to just enjoy what they’ve earned for as long as possible, Palm is already looking at new horizons and is planning to leave King Digital in favor of a new startup company.
That’s actually not small news for King, as “Candy Crush Saga” has been their primary earner so far. The company recently went public and was valued at $6 billion, most of which was attributed to their hit game. The title was bringing in some serious profits lately, with an estimated revenue of $250 million in the third quarter of 2014. The game remains in the top charts of most mobile app stores, and very few titles are enjoying more popular than it, including “Clash of Clans” and “Game of War: Fire Age”.
“Candy Crush Saga” has been enjoying great popularity for a number of reasons. On one hand, the game is very accessible, with simple, yet addictive gameplay that’s easy to learn, but hard to master. On the other, it also doesn’t rely on any fancy 3D graphics to get its point across, and its relatively low system requirements have made it available on numerous different devices across all platforms. This, combined with the great “community” marketing the game has been enjoying, has resulted in a lot of success.
And indeed, King haven’t had to put much effort into promoting their title, as players love to share their experiences with the game and describe some of its difficult levels in detail. And when you have 495 million players per month, many of them are bound to talk about your game very often.
Is Palm going to see the same success with Resolution Games? That, of course, is impossible to predict. However, he’s aiming in an entirely different direction, focusing on developing virtual reality titles. Together with Martin Vilcans and Carl-Arvid Ewerbring, he plans to explore this new market segment which has just recently started to grow very rapidly. It’s not known if his new company is going to develop original titles, or if they’re going to take a similar approach like with “Candy Crush Saga”, where they bought an already promising game and developed it into a truly successful title, realizing its full potential. Given the experience he’s accumulated with the industry, both are perfectly possible.