Candy Crush Saga weighs down King results

By Brendan Sinclair

Thursday 06 November 2014

Growth in non-Candy Crush revenues can't offset original blockbuster's decline, but company still turns $141 million profit

The good news from King's third quarter financial results today is that the company is bringing in almost as much money from games that aren't Candy Crush Saga as they are from the one game that is. The bad news is that accomplishment was made possible by a significant dip for Candy Crush Saga.

King's core numbers were down quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. For the third quarter, King reported non-GAAP bookings of $543.9 million, down 16 percent year-over-year and 11 percent quarter-over-quarter. Candy Crush bookings were $279 million, down 23 percent from the quarter before. However, non-Candy Crush bookings were $264 million, up nearly 6 percent quarter-over-quarter.

On a GAAP basis, King reported revenues down 17 percent year-over-year and 13 percent quarter-over-quarter to $514.4 million. Profits down 38 percent year-over-year and 14 percent quarter-over-quarter to $141.7 million.

While the company reported a slight jump in monthly unique users over last quarter (348 million compared to 345 million), the number of monthly unique payers slipped from 10.4 million to 8.7 million, or about 2.5 percent of players. King noted that it saw a 7 percent increase in average bookings per paying user for the quarter, attributing that to increased retention of engaged customers and the introduction of virtual currency in a number of its mobile games.

As for outlook, King would only say it expects gross bookings of between $525 million and $550 million for the current quarter. While that suggests little change from the last quarter's performance, King CEO Riccardo Zacconi stressed optimism about the outfit's prospects. He pointed to the board of directors authorizing a $150 million share repurchase program, saying it "underscores our confidence in the strength of our company.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-11-06-candy-crush-saga-weighs-down-king-results

Do they really think that game can sustain them for long?

Good, darn dem casual games taking away profits from the gaming industry

Pretty sure that they are currently working on another game. A game with every word of the dictionary in its title so they can sue later.

Fuck those guys.

It's amazing they've managed to get so much money out of basically Bejeweled and Bust-a-move clones on Facebook.

The article says their profits are down... still making hundreds of millions per quarter tho.

Casual gaming all fad based, just like the pop music industry.

Casuals latch onto a fad for 12-36 months and then they move on to something else.

That's just the nature of that segment of the market, part of the appeal is playing something that's "hip and cool" and then moving on to find something else.

Casuals are not like core gamers in that core gamers when they find a game they like they want basically to revisit that "world" over and over again for like years if not decades.

Fad crap.