Scopely’s secret sauce | PocketGamer.biz

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This week we ran our big interview with Walter Driver and Javier Ferreira, the co-CEOs of one of the world’s hottest mobile games companies right now: Scopely.

The firm won accolades for Best Publisher and Game of the Year at the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards 2024, and ranked number one on the Top 50 Mobile Game Makers 2024 list.

In our chat, we discussed Scopely’s culture and how its strategy led it to huge hits and, most recently, the multi-billion blockbuster Monopoly Go.

Some key stats from 2024 across its portfolio:

• 15 billion hours of playtime
• One billion downloads
• $10 billion in lifetime revenue

So how did they do it?

Driver said: “Having a long-term mindset is critical to game-making. Our culture is rooted in perseverance, which makes the year’s outcomes so gratifying for our teams.”

Ferreira commented: “Greatness is a moving target to ensure we’re staying committed to our players’ experience. Monopoly Go is a product of this mindset.

“The game’s seven-year journey to launch and subsequent deep engagement from players further highlighted and solidified how important it is for our culture tenets to drive our decisions, as without them, I’m not sure Monopoly Go would have made it to launch.”

“Iterate to greatness”

Perseverance is an interesting description of its culture in the context of mobile game development. The philosophy of “fail fast” and “kill your darlings” was pervasive in the mobile games industry for years.

This doesn’t mean Scopely won’t do that, Monopoly Go was in development for seven years and went through some significant changes during that process. But it didn’t give up and move on. It echoes how Lilith Games, another developer behind billion-dollar hits like AFK Arena and Rise of Kingdoms, sticks with projects.

“We will not easily cancel a project just because this metric is not met in the short-term,” said Lilith Games’ head of strategy and investment, Vincent Ou in an interview with PocketGamer.biz last year. “We typically give the development team enough time to continuously test and optimise.”

Elsewhere in our chat with Scopely, Ferreira commented: “Monopoly Go has expanded our vision of what a game experience — especially a casual one — can be.

“The journey to its success reflects the dedication, conviction, and resilience of our team. One of our core cultural tenets is to ‘iterate to greatness’, which roots us in a need to always learn and pivot as needed and have space for failure. This is the philosophy behind everything we do.”

The Fortnite effect

That feels a bit like the Fortnite effect for Epic. Even though Epic had previously developed the hit Gears of War games, Fortnite completely changed what it thought was possible. It transformed the business and raised the bar that new titles need to reach. Now Epic is the Fortnite company (though Unreal Engine is obviously a critical element).

It’ll be interesting how Scopely looks to follow up on Monopoly Go. If it sets a new high bar that’s a challenge to reach, a few years without a release will have industry pundits and analysts questioning if it’s past its best, just like Supercell.

It seems likely the next step is a major acquisition, backed by Monopoly Go’s success and of course its owner Savvy Games Group. Chief revenue officer Tim O’Brien said last year Scopely is plotting “at least one mega deal”.

“When I say mega deal, I mean a scaled global franchise doing hopefully at least a billion dollars in revenue,” he said.

Interestingly, Driver told us the publisher has already completed billions of dollars of deals. Those acquisitions and partnerships the company has made in the past didn’t come with a public price tag. So it’s a fascinating insight into a business that has raised a tremendous amount of money and spent significantly to get where it is.

Success did not come cheap, but it has arrived.

Check out the full interview here.