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Discussing the mobile app in-app-purchase model, candy crush came up, and someone said the gross revenue of that app family alone could keep over one million children fed in africa.

Some googling around I found some references:

  1. The cost of feeding a child supposedly is "a little over $1 a day" (USD$ or CAD$ ??)
    don't trust data that came from a 5 min google search

But I could not find any reliable data on CC daily earnings. It could be over a million dollars, so the claim has some basis.

So, skeptics:

Is the sum of gross revenue of all the candy crush over all mobile platforms enough to feed a million children in africa?

Mindwin Remember Monica
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King brought in $1.33 billion in revenue from its "Candy Crush Saga" property alone in calendar year 2014. If we were to divide this out daily to 1 million children in Africa, that would be approximately $3.64 per child per day (($1.33billion/1million)/365days).

The cost to feed a child in Africa seems to vary wildly from source to source, searching yielded results from $1 down to $0.19 depending on the charity. A 2009 study found that African schoolchildren across multiple countries were fed on the equivalent of $40/year (standardized at feeding a 700 Calorie meal 200 days of the year), which works out to $0.20 per day ($40/200days). Since this is only one meal of the day, we can assume it would cost $0.60 to feed a child al three meals. Thus the $1 estimate in your source is higher than expected (but could cover more varied food and administrative costs).

Either way, the above translating King's revenue for a million children ($3.64 per day) is greater than that calculated costs of a full meal by a factor of 6. So it is within reason that King's yearly revenue could feed a million Africa yearly, if not more.

Jimmy M.
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  • I'm split about this answer. Normally, self-made calculations are frowned upon on this site. However, this is the type of really simple math that would be okay in an answer. I really don't know what to think of it! – T. Sar Apr 14 '16 at 15:12
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    This is a great answer. – DJClayworth Apr 14 '16 at 15:40
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    @ThalesPereira so long the sources are real, trusteable and the calculations can be reproduced/verified, it is fine. **IF** you are worrying about the assumptions he took, he is assuming a bigger cost than the source explains. within the scope of the question, the answer is great. – Mindwin Remember Monica Apr 14 '16 at 17:19
  • @Mindwin Yeah, you're probably right. I did threw in a upvote a while ago (I liked the answer), I'm just nor sure about it's fitness. I'm not saying it's wrong - I would be happy this one could stay along. – T. Sar Apr 14 '16 at 17:26
  • @ThalesPereira my claim is not notable enough, but I got a satisfatory answer. – Mindwin Remember Monica Apr 14 '16 at 18:16
  • @Thales Pereria For what its worth, almost all of my calculations are unit conversions and not formulas of my choosing (years to days mostly). Even going from one meal a day in the study to three meals a day was primarily a unit conversion (700 Calories x 3 = 2,100 Calories which is greater than the recommended 2,000 Calorie diet). I could definitely see someone taking issue with that assumption (specifically if the meal in the study is indicative of 1/3 of daily nutritional needs, or heavily favors one aspect over another) though, even if the daily revenue is still 6x the average day. – Jimmy M. Apr 14 '16 at 18:22
  • I'll have to mark this as theoretical. While I have no issue with the calculations themselves, this relies on the assumption we can simply "scale up" existing charities. We can't assume this is a good approximation... – Sklivvz Apr 18 '16 at 11:25