We knew Candy Crush Saga was big, just not this big.
King Digital Entertainment, the company behind Candy Crush and a number of other games, filed paperwork on Tuesday for an IPO. In the filing, King revealed some stats about its most popular game that can only be described as jaw-dropping: Candy Crush had an average of 93 million daily active users in December, more than 1 billion games played per day and it accounted for 78% of the company's overall revenue in the fourth quarter.
See also: 'Candy Crush Saga' Update Will Suck Even More of Your Time
To put it another way, Candy Crush, which launched less than two years ago, generated more than $450 million in revenue for King in the December quarter, nearly double the revenue that 8-year-old Twitter generated in the same period. It's also likely that Candy Crush has a comparable number of users to Twitter, assuming that even a slim majority of King's 408 million monthly users were from Candy Crush.
"We believe Candy Crush Saga, our top title to date, is one of the largest interactive entertainment franchises of all time," the company noted in its filing. That fact may prove to be both a blessing and a curse for King as it prepares to go public.
King has more than 180 other games in addition to Candy Crush, but as the company admits three different times in its filing, "a small number of games currently generate a substantial majority of our revenue." In fact, the company's next most popular game is called Pet Rescue, which has 15 million daily users — a sixth of what Candy Crush has.

King's revenue has ballooned thanks to the success of Candy Crush Saga, but that won't last forever.
"They've only really had one big success. That's Candy Crush," says Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "Clearly that's a lot bigger than their other games. But as we know, as games go, hits go."
Eventually, the incredible success of Candy Crush will fade. As it is, King's revenue dipped slightly in the fourth quarter from the previous quarter, which the company attributed to "a decrease in Candy Crush Saga gross bookings." King had a modestly successful business before Candy Crush, with $63 million in revenues in 2011, but then it was supercharged by effectively creating a Twitter-sized business, which is now shrinking.
In the Risk Factors section of its F-1 filing, King noted that this downward trend in Candy Crush revenue could continue:
In future periods, we expect Candy Crush Saga to represent a smaller percentage of our total mobile channel gross bookings as we diversify our mobile game portfolio. If the gross bookings of our top games, including Candy Crush Saga are lower than anticipated and we are unable to broaden our portfolio of games or increase gross bookings from those games, we will not be able to maintain or grow our revenue and our financial results could be adversely affected.
That doesn't necessarily mean that King is doomed to suffer the same fate as Zynga, which went public at $10 a share in late 2011 and dipped to as low as $2 a share on concerns about its ability to transition from desktop to mobile gaming and produce more hits. In fact, some analysts argue that King may be able to benefit from Zynga's rocky experience on the public market much in the same way that Twitter benefitted from Facebook.
"The advantage investors have is they have experience with Zynga," says Arvind Bhatia, an analyst with Sterne Agee. "They can ask more probing questions. They can be more careful on the price they are going to pay. And the company and the bankers are also more fully aware of the risk investors are going to take."
But why take that risk at all? The filing states that King made $568 million in profit last year. Why does it need to raise another $500 million in an IPO? The short answer: Because it can.
"If their IPO is successful they will raise quite a lot of money and that will sustain their development for a long time," Blau says. Those additional funds can be put towards marketing efforts (the company spent $376 million on sales and marketing last year), possible acquisitions and developing games.
None of that guarantees King will ever find another success on par with Candy Crush, but it gives them more ammunition to try.
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