How many people play Candy Crush each month?

How to get close to this number

Place it against the mobile total. This site's companion question puts mobile gamers at around 2.8 billion, and a single long-running title holding a few percent of that market is plausible for one of the most successful games ever made. A few percent of nearly three billion gives hundreds of millions.

The revenue figure is the one that reframes the game: over twenty billion dollars since launch, which exceeds most blockbuster film franchises. A game most people would describe as trivial has out-earned the largest cinematic properties in history, funded entirely by a small minority of players making in-app purchases.

The demographics in the explanation are the industry's blind spot made visible. The audience skews older and more female than almost any other major game, which is precisely the audience the industry spent decades not marketing to. The most commercially successful games are frequently the ones the industry does not consider representative of itself.