A look at Candy Crush's continued popularity 15 years after its launch, with an estimated 81.5M MAUs, 190.5M installs, and $876.5M in-app revenue in FY 2025
Fifteen years in, those shiny sweets are still on top. — Johanna Chouraqui doesn't time travel anymore. The now-34-year-old …
Context & Ripple Effects
Candy Crush had already defied the usual mobile-game decay curve: related coverage found it still producing franchise-scale earnings after a decade, while earlier reporting documented unusually intensive use among part of its player base. The new estimates extend that record to year 15.
The game’s staying power comes despite Royal Match taking the global monthly puzzle-game revenue lead in 2023, making Candy Crush’s continued scale evidence of a durable two-player puzzle category rather than uncontested dominance.
First-order effects
- Candy Crush retains a large active audience and a substantial in-app-revenue stream in FY 2025, preserving its position as a major mature mobile-game property.
- Players remain the immediate source of that value: the reported 81.5 million MAUs support continued monetization long after the game’s launch.
Second-order effects
- Royal Match must defend its revenue leadership against a rival whose earnings were still unusually resilient after 10 years, keeping retention and spending central to competition in puzzle games.
- Candy Crush’s longevity raises the value of maintaining and refreshing established mobile-game communities relative to relying solely on the next breakout launch.
Third-order effects
- If large puzzle titles continue to sustain audiences and spending for more than a decade, mobile gaming will increasingly be shaped by a small set of long-lived live-service franchises rather than a rapid turnover of hits.
- The pattern also weakens the assumption, reflected in King's difficulty producing another megahit, that a publisher’s economics must depend on repeatedly replacing an aging flagship.
The trend: Mobile puzzle gaming is becoming a durable-franchise market, where years of retention and recurring purchases can matter as much as new-hit creation.