SUDDENLY, in the last year, the meaning of AI has changed and conversations about its use have become rampant.
AI used to mean how an NPC in a game moves or talks, but when you hear AI now, you imagine melting faces, lots of fingers, and a salad of gibberish words.
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In many ways, AI has become a dirty word, but we must remember what AI does best and has done for a long time.
We visited Candy Crush developer King in Stockholm, Sweden to talk about the company’s future.
Candy Crush is known for its incredibly loyal user base, and the team showed us the latest innovations waiting over the horizon that keep players coming back day after day.
This includes implementing AI into your gameplay routines, with notable impact on titles like Candy Crush Soda Saga and Farm Heroes Saga.
We spoke to King’s head of AI, Luka Crnkovic-Friis, about how AI was implemented in the Candy Crush games without subjecting us to something similar to Willy’s chocolate experience.
Crnkovic-Friis says: “We have over 100 different use cases at King. In general terms, it is divided into three main areas.
“There is content automation, which is level design. The other is personalization, which is all about recommendations.
“This is something like recommending a booster, recommending moves, recommending what to show after finishing the game and is based on the player’s gameplay.
“The third is performance marketing, which is the balance between how much you pay when buying ads versus the estimated lifetime value of the player.”
If we break this down, the level design is the randomization of candies, trying to ensure that matching candies appear random while also making mix-and-matches possible.
The second is to tailor the experience to the user, encouraging people to spend their money while balancing what seems aggressive.
Finally, AI is collecting data about users that can be sold to advertisers to show that Candy Crush ads are worth buying.
Essentially, AI is responsible for the intense work; the spreadsheets and algorithms that would be tedious for a person to do manually.
Most importantly, there are humans supervising the AI, making adjustments and balancing the work it does.
Crnkovic-Friis says: “I think the biggest challenge is that this is a huge game with a lot of users.
“We have to ensure that when we introduce a radical change, it does not negatively affect users.
“So there is a lot of testing involved and there is some time between creating a feature and deploying it.
“Candy Crush is a complex game [and you don’t want to] break anything when replacing an old component with a newer one.”
One of the biggest concerns about AI in gaming is that it could lead to industry-wide job losses and lower quality content for users.
Crnkovic-Friis says this is not King’s goal: “What we are deploying are tools that empower Kingsters, making their work more efficient and more fun.
“This is our vision for the near future. If we look at the content generated, it is simply not viable for the level of quality that we need, the level of creativity that is required for this.
“And what we have now with level design is the combination of a human designer who does the overall creative thinking, the plot, the theme.
“So the AI helps optimize the right difficulty and flow well.”
Last year, Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King, the largest technology purchase ever, costing an incomprehensible $70 billion.
This opened King up to more AI tools, and while Crnkovic-Friis says the company has no plans to use generative AI, its enthusiasm for OpenAI, which encompasses ChatGPT and video AI Sora, tells a different story.
He states: “Microsoft has opened up a lot of things for us and also indirectly through our partnership with OpenAI, we have had access to things that we wouldn’t have had if we weren’t part of it.
“And it’s incredible to be able to have this close relationship with world-leading companies.”
In return, King can offer Xbox an entry into the lucrative mobile industry, an area where Xbox is far behind.
Crnkovic-Friss says: “Xbox has no real mobile presence. So this is a really new thing for them.
“A new way of looking at game development. traditional AAA games, looked like blockbuster movies and felt like a TV show.
“But there will be a Candy Crush in 10 years and it won’t be Candy Crush 2. It will still be Candy Crush.
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