The game uses a freemium model; while it can be played completely through without spending money, players can buy special actions to help clear more difficult boards, from which King makes its revenues—at its peak, the company was reportedly earning almost $1 million per day.

Each level poses a different challenge to the user, such as removing jelly on tiles or clearing candies in a fixed number of moves to bring special ingredients to the bottom of the board.

If they collected enough matched candies to fill a meter, the game would automatically activate the Moon Struck power: the board was cleared of all candies of those two colors, and the player gained a few turns of additional matches without needing to balance colors.

Dreamworld levels used a different set of lives from the main game, allowing the player to switch back and forth between these modes.

At certain points, primarily at the start of new "episodes", users must also either purchase or receive a request from at least three friends before they may access the next set of levels.

These include tutorial guide Mr. Toffee, whose voice was changed from an over-the-top French accent in the original version of the game into a more modest deep male voice;[9] the Easter Bunny; the shop owner Mr. Yeti; Odus the owl from Dreamworld levels; the villainous Bubblegum Troll; and many others.

[10] Candy Crush's concept had been based on an early game King made, Miner Speed, that borrowed gameplay elements from Bejeweled.

"[10] Candy Crush, as with several of King's other portal games, featured tournament-style gameplay, where players could spend money to enter competitive tourneys for in-game boosts, which served as one of the main forms of revenue for the company in addition to in-game item sale microtransactions and advertisements.

[14] Most of these existing games were introduced as beta versions to Facebook users, and the company used player counts and feedback to determine which of these titles had the most prospect for moving forward, allowing them to focus more intensive development on those titles while dropping the rest, in the style of a rapid prototyping approach.

[11][14] King's first major success in this area followed with Bubble Witch Saga, released in October 2011; by January 2012 it has attracted over 10 million players and was one of fastest rising Facebook games at that time.

[17] Bubble Witch Saga introduced the "saga" approach in contrast to typical tile-matching games, where instead of having the game continue through a fixed amount of time or until the player reached an unplayable state, the game was divided into discrete levels that required the player to complete certain goals within a fixed set of moves, and where the next level could only be reached after completing the previous level.

Knutsson stated that at that time, with Candy Crush Saga as popular as it was on Facebook, they knew that they "had to get it right" in the transition process.

Tommy Palm, one of the four developers for Candy Crush Saga, stated that the first weekend numbers after the game's mobile release were over ten times greater than the estimates they expected.

[12] By January 2013, Candy Crush Saga overtook Zynga's FarmVille 2 as the top-played game on the Facebook platform.

[10] Since its release, Candy Crush Saga was expanded over the years by adding new episodes, each containing a number of new levels.

[14] New features were first tested on King's own portal to see how players there responded and allowed them to tweak these as needed, then push them into the episodes on the Facebook/mobile version.

[27] By 2013, Candy Crush Saga had been downloaded more than 500 million times across Facebook, iOS, and Android devices.

[31] Only a small percentage of the player base has purchased in-game items, up to around 4%, but this has led to millions of dollars in monthly revenue for King.

[32] Five years after its release on mobile, the Candy Crush Saga series has received over 2.73 billion downloads.

[32] Candy Crush Saga won the People's Choice Awards for Favorite Mobile Game 2016.

Other nominees were Fruit Ninja, Despicable Me: Minion Rush, Plants vs. Zombies and Temple Run.

Following news of the "candy" trademark, Ransom issued a statement in February 2014, claiming that King had intentionally copied elements from his own game including the app icon, the art for the candy pieces, and sound effects like the level-completion "Sweet!".

[44] Candy Crush Saga also received criticism when it struck a deal with Microsoft to automatically install/reinstall the game on all new computers with then latest Windows operating system and already sold devices that had been upgraded to Windows 10 Home,[45] even before Microsoft acquired King's parent company Activision Blizzard in October 2023.

Candy Crush Saga is considered to be an addictive game as it uses a compulsion loop that provides pleasurable reinforcement the more one plays.

In September 2015, another sequel named Candy Crush Jelly Saga was soft-launched in various countries for the Android platform, followed by a worldwide release in January 2016.

[58] CBS produced a live-action Candy Crush game show in partnership with King that premiered on July 9, 2017.

[63] Candy Crush Saga was used as a challenge theme for an episode of the sixth season of Project Runway All Stars.