Candy Crush Saga has 15,000 levels.
Candy Crush Saga has 15,000 levels.
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How AI and other tech are accelerating game development | Steven Collins interview

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 14 min

The acceleration of technological change is evident everywhere, and it’s benefiting games in unseen ways. In 2016, King had only 2,000 levels for Candy Crush Saga.

As the publisher King turns 20, there are now 15,000 levels for Candy Crush Saga, which has helped the company generate $20 billion in revenue and five billion downloads to date. The game had 238 million monthly active users in the second quarter.

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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.