Scopely Sees Way forward for Mobile Video games in IP Like Pokemon, Monopoly

You’ve most likely heard of “Monopoly Go!” You’ve positively heard of “Pokémon Go.” But have you ever heard of Scopely?

Founded in 2011, the mega cellular sport firm that owns these titles — plus “Stumble Guys,” the “Dice With Buddies” franchise “Star Trek Fleet Command,” “Marvel Strike Force,” “Bingo Bash,” “WWE Champions” and “Scrabble Go,” amongst others — has spent almost 15 years increase a model that’s so numerous in its choices that they couldn’t blame you for remembering the video games over the sport maker. Nor would they need to, as Scopely’s objective is to not super-serve one demographic, however present a sport to swimsuit each style.

Since launching as a small startup in Los Angeles simply forward of the large cellular and live-services gaming increase, Scopely has grown to turn into the second-largest cellular video games writer, reaching $10 billion in lifetime income in 2024 and reaching greater than a billion sport downloads so far. This spring, “Monopoly Go!” crossed the $5 billion income mark simply two years post-launch, and Scopely acquired Niantic’s profitable gaming division, together with the extremely widespread “Pokémon Go.”

“In the early days of the company, we had a few core ideas without a specific roadmap of exactly how we were going to build a company,” says co-CEO Walter Driver, who co-founded Scopely with Ankur Bulsara, Eric Futoran and Eytan Elbaz. “But we believed that play is one of the most fundamental human needs and that software was going to enable people to play together at an unprecedented scale, and that if you can create those experiences where people can form meaningful relationships with like-minded communities around those games, that they can last for a really long time.”

Driver says that to start with of the 2010s, “the enterprise mannequin of video games was evolving from content material that you just paid to buy within the premium-box-product period to free-to-play, stay providers that have been all the time on, all the time evolving and that individuals would come again to every single day for years.

“The infrastructure you needed to be successful in that era was going to be different than in the previous one,” he provides. “And, like other forms of entertainment, ultimately, this would be a very large market opportunity, but also one that would probably consolidate around a handful of companies that have built skilled global distribution and strong balance sheets and could commercialize experiences over and over again.”

So Scopely got down to turn into a pacesetter in that space by mapping out a blueprint to be “successful over and over again,” Driver says, within the free-to-play, live-service-games period they noticed quick approaching. Not lengthy after Scopely set out on this path, then-Disney execs Tim O’Brien and Javier Ferreira joined Driver in his quest for mobile-gaming domination.

For Ferreira, the plan was threefold.

“I had been in mobile gaming for a while, and what I wanted to do was to build a business that had around three competitive advantages,” says Ferreira, who joined Scopely in 2014 as chief working officer and is now co-CEO alongside Driver. “One was technology, because free-to-play games are at the intersection of gaming and technology. Live services require heavy technological capabilities to be able to operate those games effectively, and to be able to access the data on player behavior and analyze that data to be able to kind of improve the game.”

That got here to fruition with Scopely’s proprietary know-how platform, Playgami, which helps probably the most diversified portfolios within the cellular video games business.

“The second one was this idea of development as a competitive advantage. At Disney, EA and JAMDAT Mobile, I have felt that we were too constrained in the way that we thought about development,” Ferreira says of his former employers. “And what I mean by that is that generally, we were focused on the development of talent that we had, not on the whole pool of development talent that existed in the world. So I wanted to build a company where we were designed from the ground up to be able to work with anybody that we thought was great at making games.”

The third piece was “distribution competitive advantage,” which, Ferreira had discovered at Disney, may very well be finest obtained by using main IP in Scopely video games.

“We had seen before the iPhone, the era of Java smartphones,” Ferreira says. “And I had seen how difficult it was going to be to own distribution in a world of app stores, and in a world where frictionless distribution is so easy to accomplish for games, and I saw IP as a path to building that distribution advantage because the best IP in the world carries audiences.”

When it got here to executing that imaginative and prescient, O’Brien was the one main the cost to usher in Mr. Monopoly’s cash luggage — and loads of different IP — to assist Scopely attain its present $4.9 billion valuation. With O’Brien as chief income officer, Scopely has partnered with Marvel, Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount and WWE to develop their iconic characters and tales into video games prepared in your fingertips every single day. The firm has seen six gaming franchises surpass $1 billion in income every. But by far Scopely’s most high-profile and game-changing (pun supposed) deal so far was the $3.5 billion acquisition of “Pokémon Go” and the remainder of Niantic’s gaming division in May.

“We talk about forever franchises and businesses that have longevity — they had over a billion dollars in revenue in 2024, their largest year ever, almost 10 years into the game launch,” O’Brien says. “Millions of people a year are buying tickets to go see their live events, which is incredible. I can’t think of any other game in the world that brings people together in the digital and the real-world place.”

Moving ahead, Scopely is interested by exploring additional M&A — however extra targeted on constructing out its current relationships with exterior manufacturers and corporations earlier than it proceeds with its subsequent
huge deal.

“Our model is, let’s find the best game teams in the world and sometimes marry them with global brand IP, sometimes we were building original IP games,” O’Brien says. “So, we get to work with a lot of the studios that we ultimately end up acquiring over time through investment vehicles. And that’s really important because when you get to work with people over a number of years building a game, you really get to know each other, your shared values, what you want to accomplish with building, hopefully, a forever franchise.”

As the No. 1 cellular sport firm within the U.S., Scopely has no higher competitor than itself in creating these franchises. But Driver says Scopely is uniquely positioned to deal with that state of affairs because of its diverse choices.

“We have six $1 billion-plus games, but they don’t compete with each other directly for audience in a way that materially impacts the business,” Driver says. “We’ve seen there are hundreds of thousands of products in the app store, and the challenge is creating something that’s worthy of people’s time and investment and attention.”

Driver says Scopely has cracked the code on creating that product a number of instances over now: “Once they find something they like, if you’re live-operating the game effectively — and this is a concept that the traditional entertainment industry is realizing — there’s a real power in live experiences to drive ongoing engagement and free-to-play live services.”