Also, I still don't see how Candy Crush can make such a stupid amount of money.
It is a testament to Bejeweled's popularity twelve years after creation.
No, it's the same dirty tricks as all the other games in the same vein. They just...
sugar-coated it. >_>
(I'll be here all week! Try the veal.)
Candy Crush is the last one that I played for research... I got up to L50 or so, to the end of the third area. The ugly pattern was evident quickly, as I have played a fair bit of match 3 specifically, and a lot of games generally.
You'd get a few easy levels, the sort that can be passed in one go if you have any match 3 chops at all. Then it would throw a hard level with a twist at you... something that seemed innocuous enough, but would change the fundamental probability of how things rolled out. The twist would make it highly unlikely that the pieces would line up quickly enough to get a pass on any single play attempt. (the friction of slowed progress I spoke of in my big post earlier) The earlier hard levels I passed on only a few tries, but the later ones often took a dozen tries or more to pass without spending money. (and I only got to L50; there are folks up in the 400s, and levels all in between that people get stuck on for days or months)
And do they give you a whole bunch of vectors to spend money.... holy crap. Buying extra turns, buying power-ups, there's no end to the trouble you can cause for yourself if you start opening your wallet to them.
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I've not heard anything about this second screen integration stuff, but I'm usually lagging years behind, due to my desktop being officially old at this point; it simply won't handle a lot of new AAA games, so I don't even try to find out about them.