Monopoly Go! Passes $5 Billion In Two Years, But Journey Wasn't Easy

Forbes

01-05-2025

(Image courtesy of Scopely)
The mobile game Monopoly Go! just passed another big milestone, generating $5 billion in revenues in slightly less than two years, what its publisher, Scopely, says is the fastest a mobile title has ever reached that prodigious height.
But it wasn't easy creating a game that perhaps no one expected would ever, especially so quickly, join an elite club (others include Genshin Impact, Pokemon Go, and Royal Match) among the 1.4 million games released on mobile app stores, said Scopely co-CEO Javier Ferreira.
Scopely spent $70 million and seven years, beginning in 2016, trying to figure out the best way to adapt the original board game for a very different experience of gaming on a mobile phone, with a free-to-play mechanic and a strong social component.
'We knew Monopoly was a beloved (intellectual property), which in some way is saying it was a beloved experience,' Ferreira said. 'This is the key. Or maybe a beloved feeling when people were playing Monopoly. The question for us was how do we bring the game to mobile?'
A screen shot from Monopoly Go!
(Game image courtesy of Scopely)
A straight conversion wasn't likely to be successful because it couldn't really replicate the actual feeling of 'of getting rich, of bankrupting others, not just others but family members,' Ferreira said. 'And do it in a way where the stakes are low, where it felt very playful and fun.'
Early iterations of a mobile version were 'too skill-based. We didn't see audiences reacting positively to that," especially for a game that relies so heavily on luck and dice rolls, Ferreira said. Other early versions weren't social enough.
'That's kind of a key idea,' Ferreira said. 'It's a game that's fun, not just because of the mechanic itself, but because of who you are playing it with.'
One key in unlocking a successful mobile take on a very well established board game was optimizing it so people could easily play with friends and family in 'your real social graph,' rather than 'the social graph inside the game," Ferreira said.
That social web of connections helped encourage people to keep coming back repeatedly over weeks and months, and now, years. Now, some 10 million players access the game daily, according to Scopely.
And Ferreira said that while a $70 million development budget seems steep, 'you can't complain. In free-to-play live services, when you're thinking about titles that can have a life cycle of 10 or 20 years, how much you invest in development isn't that expensive. (Focus instead on) how do you make a good game? Your investment will always be really good."
The company, like all operators of live-service mobile titles, relies heavily on data to track what's working for which players, and constantly adjust its various parameters.
'How do you use data to listen to what players are telling you, so you can continually evolve the game and make it better every day,' Ferreira said.
Such constant tuning is more vital than ever in a highly competitive fight for players' attention, not just from all those other games on mobile and other devices, but also social media, traditional media, live events, sports, music and so much else.
The game business has been severely challenged the past couple of years, after the peri- and post-pandemic game-playing rush abated beginning around 2023. People are back to many parts of their old routines and ways to spend their leisure time, cutting game time notably for many.
That makes careful construction of games to maximize engagement vital, said Nate Jones, vice president of corporate strategy and development for Sony Interactive Entertainment, the PlayStation unit of Sony.
'Consumer media time is plateauing,' Jones said, speaking at Monday's Los Angeles Games Conference legal & finance summit. 'Games have avoided (problems with) that, but they may not in the future. There's been no net new growth, and more competition for audiences than we have seen a few decades.'
Ferreira said Monopoly Go!'s monetization structure isn't 'particularly unique,' but it was built around two big key performance indicators: 'an incredible long-term retention curve for the game that was better and higher than we had ever seen here at Scopely. The second thing that's driven success is the virality, the social dynamics in the game. Those social dynamics have been key to driving retention, but also downloads.'
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The game's success over the past two years wasn't a big factor in the $4.9 billion 2023 acquisition of Scopely by Saudi-backed Savvy Games, Ferreira said, but it certainly has made the transition to Savvy ownership a much easier experience.
'It mattered not so much pre-acquisition, but post-acquisition, it allowed Savvy to feel pretty great about the investment they've made," Ferreira said. It's worked so well that that Scopely just announced another big deal, buying Niantic's game unit for $3.9 billion. That deal brings rights to augmented-reality pioneer Pokemon Go among much else.
To help keep Monopoly Go! top of mind with different slices of its audiences, the company has done multiple cross-over deals, including with Marvel and, beginning today, a two-month collaboration with another big Disney brand, Star Wars (see trailer at end of story), said Ferreira.
Monopoly Go's first-year success, when it topped $3 billion in revenues, was invoked multiple times by LA Games Conference panelists.
'You couldn't get two more different studios, but Scopely and (Baldur's Gate III maker) Larian Studios understood what their communities needed, and delivered,' said Eugene Evans, a former long-time executive at Hasbro (which has owned the Monopoly IP for years) and founding principal of Infinite Ventures.
One advantage Monopoly Go! had is what Evans called 'a 90-year first-time user experience. They have been training people to play Monopoly for many years. Many players who paid there (for in-game assets) have never paid for an online game before. That game broke through all expectations. Nobody knew it was going to do $3 billion in its first 12 months.'
Both L:arian and Scopely, in building very different kinds of game experiences for PC and mobile respectively, understood that merely delivering a good game wasn't enough, Evans said. In each case, giving players reasons to keep coming back, keep sharing about the game, and keep recruiting friends and family to join them, was crucial for long-term success.
'People only have two things, disposable money and disposable time,' Evans said. 'It used to be (the formula for success was), 'How many products can we sell them.?' Now, it's, 'How much time can we get them to spend?''
Evans also suggested that Monopoly Go! and similar well-constructed, easy-to-learn mobile games have been riding a wave of democratization in who plays games these days, even if they don't identify as 'gamers.'
'The average age of gamers is 25 years older now than it was 25 years ago,' Evans said. 'We're all gamers now. We've all grown up with it. That includes people who play Candy Crush or Monopoly Go! every day, and they'll still say, 'No, I'm not a gamer.''