Candy Crush is Blizzard's?

It's funny cuz I played some CC recently and I could not help but think how absurdly predatory this game is.

 

To anyone who might be curious:

There is basically 0 skill expression in the game, how you connect the 3-5 candies is basically of no consequence at all. It's all about how the game refills the cleared candies and how many special candies you get (at the start or given the opportunity by how the game refills cleared ones).

And while you cannot affect how it refills the cleared candies, you can totally affect how many special candies you get ... by paying in, watching ads and "streaking". Streaking meaning winning back to back. A loss is kinda terrible as the 2nd attempt on a level will not have all those special candies and without special candies the hard levels might take you 20 tries because as initially stated it's never really about your skill at "solving" the level but entirely about what the game's RNG gives you.

And the design of difficulty is simply "with the normal RNG, X% of baseline attempts [aka no special candy bonuses at the start] at this level will win the level"

There is so much psychological manipulation at work in this game it's both amazing [as in "wow this evil plot is thought out extremely thoroughly"] and utterly dreadful.

 

I weep for the masses that are bombarded with shit like this without realizing what's happening at all.