With a huge game like Candy Crush Saga, bad ads will happen

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
September 30, 2013
Updated June 18, 2025
2 min

Some people are getting fed up with Candy Crush Saga ads hijacking their phones.

The “match three” puzzle game has dominated the mobile charts for the past year, but not everyone is happy with its creators, London-based King. Ads for Candy Crush Saga will sometimes take over a phone and redirect a mobile browser to the download page on the Google Play or Apple iTunes app store. This is quite a big deal since it’s one of the world’s biggest games with 700 million play sessions a day on Android and iOS. King said that it is a victim of adware created by scammers, and that has forced it to put one particular ad network on hold.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.