Essays 08 May 2023, 11:06

What's the Most Popular Game? List of Most-played Video Games

Call of Duty, Minecraft, or Red Dead Redemption 2? The most popular games in the world are much less obvious than it might seem to regular players.

Candy Crush Saga

Scale of popularity:

by 2017, 2.7 billion games from the series were downloaded;
in the fourth quarter of 2018, King's mobile games had 268 million active players per month;
three and a half years ago, 9 million people spent 3 to 6 hours a day in the game;
in 2021, the production generated $1.2 billion in revenue, and in 2022, $1 billion (source);
in 2022, the number of downloads increased to 3.4 billion; a year earlier, 255 million people played the game every month (source).

Candy Crush Saga was one of the first giants of the free-to-play model – it was after the success of this game that match-3 puzzle games brought about the great offensive of seemingly free productions on mobile platforms and Internet browsers. The creators of CCS waisted no time, too, quickly turning their game into, well, a saga. We're still waiting for Farm Super Heroes Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga, Pet Rescue Saga, Diamond Digger Saga, and so on.

The first Candy Crush Saga debuted in April 2012, and a year later, it could boast 500 million downloads, as well as 6.7 million active users a day. Interestingly, despite all the years, the game is still highly popular – in 2014, it had over 245 million active users per month; in 2016, the number decreased to 166 million, but in November 2017, increased back to 293 million. The CCS sequels also fared very well – a total of four games included in the series were installed over 3.4 billion times.

Unofficial data indicate that the mobile title is still extremely popular. Interestingly, it's more popular among women than men – a rare situation in the gaming world.

Learn more about Candy Crush Saga

Table of Contents

Candy Crush Saga