King’s games guru is Tommy Palm, on the game that’s being played 700m times a day on smartphones and tablets!

Candy Crush Saga has become a craze on Facebook, iOS and Android alike.

The key stat is right there in the headline: seven in ten people who’ve reached the last level of wildly-popular mobile game Candy Crush Saga ⁹haven’t spent any money on in-app purchases.

This may come as a surprise. Hardcore gamers (and a fair few developers) often attack King’s puzzler as the epitome of dreadful, money-sucking freemium gaming, exploiting people too stupid to realize they’re being exploited.

It’s gaming ¹snobbery of the worst kind, and not because Candy Crush doesn’t sometimes ³feel over-aggressive in the way its difficulty curve ⁴nudges ⁵players towards in-app ⁶purchases – it sometimes ²does – ⁷but because it’s based on a view of casual gamers as little more than lab rats, tapping buy-buttons when commanded rather than seeking “proper” games elsewhere.

As a player, I ⁸ducked out of Candy Crush Saga when I hit my personal ceiling of fun versus payment. As a journalist, though, I feel like defending the game against its ¹⁰fiercer critics, who seem to think its players are incapable of making similar decisions.

_{http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/sep/10/ candy-crush-saga-king-interview}

All the words below are related to the phrasal verb “ducked out” (ref. 8), EXCEPT