Beta levels of Candy Crush

When I played the game it was already at public soft launch. I could be wrong but I think the time I joined it already had 20.000 DAU (however facebook used inflated numbers). It was publicly accessible and I think I even linked to the game in my former german skillgaming blog so everyone who wanted to participate early was able to access the game as well. But at that time people on facebook prefered to play Bubble Shooters and didn`t care about the new Candy Crush Saga which wasn't featured in the top charts or promoted to a broader audience. It took 6 months for other players to upload videos on Youtube, which I never understood as people even started to copy my Bubble Witch Saga videos after a few weeks. Every senior working in casual games already knew that swap Match 3 games were much more popular than Bubble Shooters. At least I did, because industry data from from 2005-2012 as well as player behaviour on cash skill game websites like gameduell and royalgames/midasplayer told me so. Sometimes I think I was the first external believer in Candy Crush Saga. I even quit my job in 2010 to wait for such a game to be released. So I eagerly waited 2 years for a match 3 game on facebook after I found out about Woogas Bubble Island in 2010 which was a clear indicator for upcoming, even bigger casual game hits. Luckily, Bubble Witch Saga was released a few months earlier so I could do some testing to verify my theory of level based casual games. It never surprised me that Candy Crush Saga easily outperformed Bubble Witch Saga. I think I even predicted it in my former german blog post that you can still find on archive.org. So when King started PR and broader user acquisition and people actually gave Candy Crush Saga a try, it immediately began skyrocketing. So, no I didn`t have any private pre-access, just personal interest and a huge conviction.

But I know some sort of earlier beta/alpha existed before, as King employees publicly posted screenshots of a different version of the game in social media. But I think this version was exclusively used privately / internally and never shared with the public. I never had access to any beta version of the game.

Official Facebook analytics data was one of my sources to find out about new King games as soon as they were made public. King also showed game banners to active players of their other games (like Bubble Saga, Mahjong Saga, etc.) to crosspromote some players to their new games. I assume this kind of promotion was ended as soon as a certain number of new users to was reached. At some point they also promoted their facebook games in the midasplayer/royalgames blog but that was after 2012. Please understand that I can`t share the detailed information on how King used to soft launch games or share any screenshots of the beta/alpha. I suggest you conduct some more own research on how facebook game launches used to be executed. I think you can even still find beta screenshots with clever google image search. For any information not available to the public, you certainly have to ask King, but not me :) 

Thanks,

Robert

Sorry I got it wrong. You asked about the time before April 2012. I thought you were asking about before September 2012 or so since there was hardly any PR and news coverage about Candy Crush Saga for a few months from April 2012 onwards. I just checked my archive and saw that I recorded the first video a week before April 2012, so the game was made publicly accessible one week before April 2012 to everyone who manually researched Facebook Analytics Data about Kings Developer account to know about the app name. I had no access to earlier versions of the game, but as I said I knew about the development of the game way before April 2012 and since that time I clicked the game link daily until I was granted access. Until today it is common for new games to unlock access a few days before public soft launch to prepare PR, to test links, etc..

Official early soft launch access via cross-promotion refers to the time from April 2012 onwards.

The reason I labeled some videos as "Beta" on Youtube is because it was the first level update that King did. It is now misleading as in fact the videos were not recorded during the closed beta, but during public soft launch (that I had access to a week before others because I researched the game link myself).