Candy Crush Creator's Shares Tumble

Shares in King, the mobile games company known for its Candy Crush Saga series, fell as far as 14 percent following its most recent financial report.

The slump comes after King warned that it expects "softer" revenues, between $490 million to $520 million, in the current financial quarter. Despite this poor outlook, King's first quarter net income rose to $164 million for the three months ending March 31.

King chief executive Riccardo Zacconi was nevertheless optimistic about the corporation's performance, pointing out that three of its games are among the top-ten grossing games on the Apple and Google app stores.

Looking forward, the company said it plans to bring Candy Crush to Windows 10 devices, and also launch the first of its new games in the second half of 2015.

"We are pleased by the sustained popularity of our games, which is also reflected in our second consecutive quarter of company-high network reach metrics and we look forward to leveraging the extraordinary power of our massive player base in launching new innovative games in 2015 and beyond."

Despite King's struggle to maintain the same level of profitability, mobile games remain a key area of investment for the games industry in general. Nintendo recently announced it has entered into a deal with the global mobile games publisher DeNA, which includes the creation of "new gaming applications featuring Nintendo IP, which [both companies] will develop specifically for smart devices."

Shintaro Asako, the chief executive at DeNA West, has said he believes Nintendo's IP has the gravitas to reach unprecedented numbers of smartphone players. While Candy Crush Saga peaked in 2014 at 93 million daily active users, Asako thinks DeNA and Nintendo can top that.

“I've wanted to create something globally successful, not only for kids, but for mid-aged people and beyond," Asako said.

“The game should attract a huge range of people. We wanted to get a huge audience like Candy Crush, like 100 million users. We wanted to create something with that kind of DAU [daily active user] base."