As you may know, King Digital, the company behind the blockbuster game Candy Crush Saga, is about to IPO. The company is seeking a valuation of up to $7.6 billion.

Let me put that in the style it deserves: seven-point-six billion dollars!

I’m not the only one using boldface italics and exclamation points. Jim Surowiecki in the New Yorker and Felix Salmon at Reuters (and many, many others) have analyzed the IPO. The Surowiecki / Salmon consensus is basically, as summarized by my colleague Walt Frick, It’s irrational for the market to value a company that produced a fluke hit so high, but it’s totally rational for the CEO to selfishly want to go public, since the market is valuing them so much higher than they’re actually worth. Surowiecki thinks that the cost of the capital will be too high; the company will actually have to deliver on its promise, and delivering on promises to shareholders is a pain in the neck. Salmon thinks that the market is so frothy that companies have to have a credible plan to IPO just to seem viable as an acquisition.

That’s all well and good, but let’s try to assess King Digital’s core claim: that they have a system for producing addictive games. If you believe that claim, then, given the size of the market for mobile games, you might be willing to pay $21 to $24 per share for a piece of the magic. Of if you’re a tech company looking to own that magic formula, you might be willing to acquire the whole company the day before the IPO for around the market valuation.

So, do they have a magic formula? Let’s start with their one hit game, Candy Crush. It is in fact really well designed around all of the principles of gamification. As this article in Time summarizes: it makes you wait, it provides positive rewards, you can play with one hand, paying is optional but easy, it’s social and nostalgic and escapist, and there’s always more. Fair enough. I’ve spent lots of hours playing the game. So have my wife and daughter and countless others. (If you haven’t played or seen it, go ahead an download the app. I’ll wait a couple of months for you to come back.)

But is this a magic formula? Maybe. But it’s definitely not a secret magic formula. These are well-known principles behind game design and have been used successfully before (e.g., Zynga’s FarmVille for a recent example). Raph Koster published a book illuminating the principles over ten years ago.

And what if it were a secret magic formula? Would that be enough? Probably not. The formula is necessary to have a hit — but not sufficient.

That assessment is based on the work of some Columbia University sociologists, including Matt Salganik. In his interview with HBR, Salganik explained that having a cultural product of good quality is not enough. It’s social processes that makes one good product take off rather than some other equally good (or even better) product.

Salganik and colleagues ran a series of experiments to see how hit songs take off (see the interview for details), but their findings are equally applicable to any cultural product: books, TV shows, and, yes, mobile games. As Salganik said:

Higher quality songs, as a group, will outperform the lower quality ones, but which high-quality song is going to break out is impossible to figure out beforehand. In the experiment, we rewound the world and saw the range of possible outcomes that could have happened – and they’re all over the place!

That is, you cannot predict blockbusters. And that includes the Harry Potter books, the Mona Lisa, “Gangnam Style,” and, yes, Candy Crush.

Having the magic formula for producing addictive games is a necessary component for success (cf. Flappy Bird), but by itself it’s not sufficient, not when there are going to be other games out there that are just as well designed. One way that King Digital could still win is if they could flood the market with games that are all well designed in the same way Candy Crush is. To date, this has not been their strategy.

King Digital is hoping the market will overlook these complications, and perhaps it will. But over time, the problems with a strategy that seeks to produce cultural hits based on a well known formula is bound to run into trouble.