Todd Green, head of the company that created ‘Candy Crush’: ‘Success for us is that players want to play for years’

Walking into the Barcelona offices of the video game developer King (the company behind mobile games like Candy Crush, Bubble Witch and Farm Heroes) is like entering a dream full of cotton candy and gigantic candies. “We opened the Barcelona headquarters in 2012, and I came to the company a year later,” recalls the UK-born Tom Green, 42, who has been president since May. “I’ve spent a lot of time here, it’s a great location, with a lot of very versatile teams.”

The Spanish office, which is King’s second-largest after Stockholm, has been a creative pillar of the company for years, a site where it has designed levels, interfaces, and where it now works on yet-to-be-announced titles. King, founded over two decades ago, is one of the big names associated with the rise of video games for mobile phones and its crown jewel, Candy Crush Saga, has been downloaded over five billion times and generated more than $23 billion.

Green, who in May went from being the director of Candy Crush to the president of the entire company, seems comfortable when speaking about familiar territory: the games themselves. “Our games are unique in their design and in the expression of their ideas. We can be proud of what we have achieved, and at the same time, be hungry to create new things. My job now is to refine and adjust all the pieces to get the best product possible.” His goal is a highly refined product — but there are complex intervening factors at play. As the video game industry undergoes a global wave of layoffs — more than 15,000 in 2025 — King’s position is a paradox. Its star title continues to be one of the more profitable franchises on the planet, but the company itself is restructuring. Since its acquisition by Microsoft in 2023, the firm has been immersed in a worldwide integration process that has affected several of its divisions, including the one in Spain.

Two redundancy plans in under a year have left the Barcelona office reeling. Green is taking over as president with a twofold challenge: to rebuild internal confidence and keep the creative spirit alive. “It’s difficult, especially for those affected, but these are steps we believe are necessary,” he says. In August, the workers affected by layoffs pointed to a primary cause: the replacement of humans by artificial intelligence. Green, however, rejects this explanation. “None of the layoffs were due to AI. I love talking about how we use it, but I want to be clear: the changes we made were not because of that.”

The two rounds of layoffs in Barcelona — one took place in November 2024, the other in the summer of 2025 — reduced the offices’ staff to some 120 employees. “After seeing two massive layoffs in one year, people feel like anything could happen,” sums up a union representative consulted by EL PAÍS. The union has stated that official causes (internal reorganization and adoption of a more horizontal model) cover up a more profound shift: the automatization and externalization of workload that forms part of Microsoft’s strategy. “It’s not the official reason, but it’s clear that automatization played a role in these decisions,” a representative says.

The company president insists that the AI tools are used as support for human work, not as a substitute. “We use it like a copilot,” Green elaborates. “In Candy Crush, for example, we have more than 20,000 levels. Before, adjusting the difficulty of each one was a completely manual process. Now, we use machine learning to detect levels that have gone outside the range of difficulty we want. AI helps us to be more efficient, but the design continues being deeply human.”

King has belonged to tech giant Microsoft since the latter’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and employee concerns have also formed around the views of Microsoft CEO of Satya Nadella. After the layoff of more than 9,000 company employees in July, Nadella wrote that the emergence of AI, “reminds me of the early ’90s, when PCs and productivity software became standard in every home and every desk! What does empowerment look like in the era of AI? It’s not just about building tools for specific roles or tasks. It’s about building tools that empower everyone to create their own tools.”

Microsoft and creative autonomy

Ever since Microsoft bought King — after a long process — the question that has consumed the sector is whether its newly acquired studios will preserve their autonomy. Green says they will. “I would say that the great contribution that King can make to the gaming side of Microsoft is our mobile domination. We have an enormous audience, established intellectual properties, on-point technology and a direct connection with players. We continue to be responsible for our own creative destiny.” He continues, “The nucleus of our business continues to be the same: trying to make the best games possible. Success for us is that players want to play for years, not that they try a title and forget it.”

When asked about the secret of a success as long-lived as that of Candy Crush, Green sounds like a digital entertainment philosopher: “It is the perfect marriage between form and function. You have a small screen and games with simple interactions, but combined, they generate deep complexity. Although the rules are simple, its potential is infinite.” That alchemy — apparently simple, with hidden depth — is, according to the president, what has kept the saga alive for 13 years. That’s no small feat. In a market where mobile games compete with multi-million dollar production and virtual realities, the company stands behind the essence of the puzzle as its own, nearly universal language. “There are a lot of people who don’t identify as a gamer, but who play mobile games every day,” says Green. “The phone is the most popular form of playing video games in the world, and puzzles continue to be the most played games on phones.”

Despite this serene rhetoric, Green is not unaware of the company’s internal wounds. “It’s always difficult to restructure a company,” he admits. “But sometimes you have to do it to prepare for the future.” A few weeks ago, the company held its internal event KingnfoMarket in Barcelona, an attempt to turn the page and look toward a new year. “The goal is to build a healthy, productive and creative company. If we combine those three things, we will be in good shape.” Workers, however, are looking on cautiously. “Green knows how King works and he has good ideas, but he has been put in charge of a very tough era. We are hopeful,” says one employee. The lesson seems to hail from the company’s games: trust must be rebuilt, move by move.

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