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Candy Crush-Maker King Lays Off 200 Staff, Replacing Many With AI Tools They Built (mobilegamer.biz) 39

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Candy Crush-maker King is cutting approximately 200 employees, with many positions filled by AI tools the departing workers helped develop, according to multiple sources who spoke anonymously to industry publication MobileGamer.biz. The layoffs heavily target level designers, user research staff, and UX and narrative writers across King's London, Barcelona, Stockholm, and Berlin studios.

The London-based Farm Heroes Saga team faces cuts of roughly 50 people, including key leadership positions. "Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they've spent months building tools to craft levels quicker," one staffer said. "Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams."

Candy Crush-Maker King Lays Off 200 Staff, Replacing Many With AI Tools They Built More | Reply

Candy Crush-Maker King Lays Off 200 Staff, Replacing Many With AI Tools They Built

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  • And then *poof* Stagnation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @10:51AM (#65522278) Homepage Journal

    Replacing humans with AI would in a few years just result in a stagnant company because you can only consume your own manure for a limited time.

    • Their games aren't fun they're addictive. The only person who matters at that company or the psychologists that designed the gameplay loops.

      Companies like King are in the best position to abuse ai. They can absolutely regurgitate the same graphics and gameplay with subtle tweaks to get more money out of people.

      • Yeah, I'd be surprised if they don't have a bunch of A/B tests running all the time to try and determine which icons/gameplay/mechanics are the most addictive and drive more users to the games. They just want you to pump your time and money into them.

      • The games have ads and didn't candy crush only give you a certain amount of moves then you needed to wait? How can anyone get addicted to that? You cannot even play it.

    • Replacing humans with AI would in a few years just result in a stagnant company because you can only consume your own manure for a limited time.

      Unfortunately this only matters for executives that who care about the future legacy of a company, and most decision makers mostly care about their stock bonuses. So they are incentivized to sacrifice the future of the company for short-term stock appreciation. Or in this situation, since King is owned by Microsoft, these executives are motivated to please Microsoft enough that they get some sort of bonus.

      This is a systemic flaw in the corporate system. If executive bonuses were tied to long-term bonuses

  • Does this mean that banal games like Candy crush will evolve to even more banal drek?

    • Banal or not, Candy Crush Saga is a fantastically profitable game. If what you describe as drek is what customers like and are willing to pay for, why would it be surprising that someone is happy to provide?

      As for the layoffs, it appears that the general trend is to remove the money from businesses and into the hands of the wealth managers, possibly in anticipation of the coming financial crash. And King most certainly does have fat to lose, from various SVPs of Talking to Other SVPs to copywriters that hav

  • Angst Level Soviet (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @10:59AM (#65522296)
    Are you trying to tell me that there were 200 people whose full-time job was designing levels for Candy Crush? That is BLEAK.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No! There were 200 people that was a *fraction* of the workforce.

      Usually you don't lay off 100% in a shift like this. 10%, or 20%. So, there could be thousands of them.

      • It was over 2,000. They are the largest studio that Microsoft owns. They are bigger then all of the Activision studios that were pumping out yearly Call of Duty games combined.

        Yet from their release schedule they put out fewer than one new game a year. I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up like Twitter where 70% of the staff could be let go and it would keep humming along.

    • I'm assuming they worked on other titles as well, but it's not surprising they were laid off. That many staff for the kind of games they're making seems excessive.

  • I've never even played Candy Crush.

  • That's OK (Score:3)

    by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @11:15AM (#65522332)
    I use robots to play Candy Crush for me.

  • Damn (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2025 @11:18AM (#65522336) Homepage
    You know, I've been trying to replace myself with software for the last 20 or so years. The better I get at it, the more demand I have for my services.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zlives ( 2009072 )

      hmmm seems you are still not good enough?
      trust me if you were successful, bye bye

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by RobinH ( 124750 )
        I've been working in industrial automation for 25 years, installing industrial robots and manufacturing machines and so on. All of these machines were only ever installed at companies that were growing and hiring more people. I've never seen a machine installed that was followed by lay-offs. Plants only close down because demand dries up, or because they can't compete with the cost of overseas labor. Faster automation is the only way to make American workers compete with workers in China for the same wo

      • if he gets much better he won't work at all...

  • I worked a construction job. I got paid to help build a house for somebody. Now that dude won't continue to pay me because the house he hired me to build is completed.

    Moral of the story: get on the ownership/investor side ASAP.

    • "Moral of the story: get on the ownership/investor side ASAP."

      Everyone can't do that, and the economy would collapse if they tried and they would lose too

      • Everyone can do that. It's as easy as buying publicly traded stock. If you have a retirement account or pension it's almost certainly based in large part off of an index fund.

        Stock options are a fairly common form of compensation for software developers at many companies, startups in particular. You don't need to found a company to be an owner.
        • I think you missed their point.

          The economy rapidly collapses if there are only owners, and no workers.
          A worker can own, but can't be an owner, i.e., investment/passive income as primary income source.
          This is intimated in the original statement:

          get on the ownership/investor side

          They are drawing the line between owner/passive income "earner", and worker.

        • The options you're granted as an employee are restricted stock units. You have no voting/owning power.
          But get as many as you possibly can for free. Employee stock purchase matching and 401k matching are "free money" basically.
          It's just a way to keep you from jumping from company to company, selling secrets and bumping your salary each time.
          RSU's should not be a thing, but I see why corporations have that as a lever to pull. Also stock buybacks. But unleashing the investing power of the billionaire class mea

  • Especially where it applies to anything so mundane as game level generation?

    • A lot of games have level designing tools that create level files and bundles of assets. Building these things used to be an art, and doing art was a job, and doing that job well meant a game looked good and was fun to play. Just like AI generated music, these games are going to be uninspiring slop that are all equally bad.
      On the other hand, really good tools would let level designers build stuff faster with less tedium.

  • Don't make it easy for an employer to fire you by creating in house AI tools. This is a look into a very dystopic future.

  • deep in this article is a reminder that this is Microsoft which is driving this AI madness. King, purchased by Activision-Blizzard, then Microsoft as part of the consolidation. This is driving completely by MS and their AI push to automate all the things with AI.

    Personally I have no love for King's games they are all clones of some other game IMO. I'm not actually aware of their current level of lootbox/gambling type mechanics but that was my impression of their games.

    We definitely have reached the stage

  • Some years ago i had an appointment for an interview as software developer at King, but then I found accounts on how they had treated former employees and contractors, and that really changed my mind.

    I think that the "corporate death penalty" should be applied more: Forced shutdown and its assets forfeited.

  • I mean, whenever you think people cannot get more stupid, you read something like that.

  • Such a layoff of skilled programmers that can successfully automate with AI means they get hired immediately.

  • I just cant believe there are enough people on the Farm Heroes Saga team that laying off 50 people still leaves a team. I just watched a video of this game in action and it looks like the type of game that could be made with pretty minimal labor even without AI.

    • Did you watch real footage of the game or an advert? Most if not all of the adverts for phone games that you will see are nothing like the games themselves.

  • One of many links to the story:
    https://metro.co.uk/2014/02/13... [metro.co.uk]

    I would never play anything from King.

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