Candy Crush Saga player Ruben Valenzuela is suing King and Activision Blizzard over a $250,000 Candy Crush Saga tournament, according to court documents reviewed by Aftermath. Valenzuela and his lawyers allege in a complaint filed last week in a Los Angeles court that King “tricked players” into believing they had better chances of winning than they actually did, leading to players spending much more time and money than they might otherwise.
Valenzuela wrote that King did not accurately supply players with information necessary to assess their chances—how many players advance through each stage (and obscuring the amount of players that did), rampant cheating, unfair advantages given to “super users,” and the ability for players to play offline and mask scores, which mucked up the tournament’s leaderboards. Valenzuela and his lawyers posit that the Candy Crush All Stars 2023 tournament is a way for King and Activision Blizzard to “entice users to spend money and to spend more of it.”
The Candy Crush All Stars tournament began in 2020 and has been held yearly since. A New Yorker named Jay Simunovich won in 2023, beating out “roughly 20 million people,” according to King. Fifteen million people participated in 2025, where an Ohio man, Ben Chin, won the $500,000 prize. This year, in June, King awarded another $500,000 to a man named Tiago, from Portugal, after he beat out 15 million people. Players are pooled into groups and tasked with climbing to the top of their leaderboards by collecting All Star Candies, which are rewarded for completing levels. Players do this through a bunch of different rounds until the top 10 players reach the finals, which are held in person.
Valenzuela is one of those 20 million players who participated in 2023, according to the complaint. Lawyers wrote that the tournament “consumed” his life because the leaderboards gave him the impression he was in the lead.
“At every turn, he was given the impression that he was in the lead, and knew that if he stopped playing for even a few minutes, he would lose his place,” they wrote.
It went on for a month before Valenzuela was knocked out of the tournament and stopped playing. He spent “thousands of dollars” on the event, according to the complaint, buying in-game bonuses to help him accrue points.
His lawyers called the event a “scam.”
“And perhaps we could blame Ruben, and the millions of people like him who did the same, if the game had been fair,” they wrote. “We could say that adults should not allow themselves to be led astray by sleek corporate marketing and clever corporate machinations designed to draw players into a game where they need to spend their wages on color bombs and lollipop hammers. After all, if a corporation can convince people that they should exchange their money earned in the real world for intangible thingamajigs in the cyber world, then people have only themselves to blame.”
But lawyers said the tournament isn’t fair, largely due to how King allegedly obscures a person’s chances at winning. They said that the player numbers are obscured by King pulling people into small groups of just dozens of players, instead of thousands, which leads people to believe they’ve got to beat less people. They also alleged that Candy Crush All Stars was rife with cheaters who quickly scale the leaderboards knocking legitimate players out—the issue here, according to the complaint, is that it’s not disclosed to players. Similarly, lawyers said King doesn’t disclose the advantage some players who play a ton of Candy Crush Saga get; players who beat more than 14,000 Candy Crush Saga boards gain access to levels that have huge point multipliers. Lastly, lawyers blame the lack of disclosure of offline players, whose scores aren’t uploaded until a person goes online, making the leaderboard misleading. So, if a person accrued a million points while playing offline, it wouldn’t be listed on the leaderboard until the device was connected to the internet. A player with 999,999 points would think they’re in the lead.
The big problem with all this, according to the lawyers, is that players like Valenzuela made purchasing decisions based on the leaderboard positioning. A person in third place would potentially spend money on boosts to reach first place, but may not actually be in third place, say, if someone with a higher score was playing offline. That person will appear to suddenly surpass you when they do connect to the internet, and their score appears on the leaderboard.
The lawsuit cites Candy Crush Saga forum posts in which players rant about the tournament—offline players making it “impossible” to gauge positioning, about cheaters who had impossibly high scores just minutes after the event began, and lamenting the sheer amount of money they’d spent in an attempt to win big.
“The whole tournament is designed to mislead players into spending money for what was essentially a lottery,” one person wrote.
The Candy Crush All Stars tournament’s current terms and conditions do address some of these complaints. A section titled Unfair Play described a “zero-tolerance policy” for anything deemed unfair play, like using exploits or hacking, sharing an account, using bots, and playing on multiple devices simultaneously. King also addressed offline play, though not necessarily for players on the other end: King wrote that players using the game offline could see disruptions to their scores. “You agree that King is not liable for any data loss resulting from your offline play, and we will not restore any such data loss to your gameplay or King account,” it said.
In a section labeled Costs, King said participants don’t have to make purchases to play, but certainly can.
Indeed, elsewhere on the internet, players warned each other against getting too invested. One person who claimed to reach the final knockout round said they played for 24 hours straight to get that positioning. Another person chimed in: “I played from 8am to about 3am non stop and when I noticed the person in 2nd stopped playing I took a quick nap and rested my eyes up until I saw them started playing again so I continued around 6am until 7:30,” they wrote on Reddit. “There were times when they took over first but I took it back and finally got a 40k lead on them.”
Some players wrote they’ve made it past several rounds without spending any money, but others, like Valenzuela, said they’ve spent thousands for a chance at the grand prize.
Valenzuela and his lawyers are looking to find King in violation of the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and also alleged fraud and unjust enrichment. They’re looking for the lawsuit to be certified as a class action. Aftermath has reached out to Activision Blizzard and King for comment.
