You’ve probably heard of “Monopoly Go!” You’ve definitely heard of “Pokémon Go.” But have you heard of Scopely?
Founded in 2011, the mega mobile game company that owns those titles — plus “Stumble Guys,” the “Dice With Buddies” franchise “Star Trek Fleet Command,” “Marvel Strike Force,” “Bingo Bash,” “WWE Champions” and “Scrabble Go,” among others — has spent nearly 15 years building up a brand that is so diverse in its offerings that they couldn’t blame you for remembering the games over the game maker. Nor would they want to, as Scopely’s goal is to not super-serve one demographic, but provide a game to suit every taste.
Since launching as a small startup in Los Angeles just ahead of the big mobile and live-services gaming boom, Scopely has grown to become the second-largest mobile games publisher, achieving $10 billion in lifetime revenue in 2024 and reaching more than a billion game downloads to date. This spring, “Monopoly Go!” crossed the $5 billion revenue mark just two years post-launch, and Scopely acquired Niantic’s lucrative gaming division, including the highly popular “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 in the beginning of the 2010s, “the business model of games was evolving from content that you paid to purchase in the premium-box-product era to free-to-play, live services that were always on, always evolving and that people would come back to every day for years.
“The infrastructure you needed to be successful in that era was going to be different than in the previous one,” he adds. “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 set out to become a leader in that area by mapping out a blueprint to be “successful over and over again,” Driver says, in the free-to-play, live-service-games era they saw fast approaching. Not long 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 operating 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 came to fruition with Scopely’s proprietary technology platform, Playgami, which supports one of the most diversified portfolios in the mobile games industry.
“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 learned at Disney, could be best obtained by utilizing major IP in Scopely 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 came to executing that vision, O’Brien was the one leading the charge to bring in Mr. Monopoly’s money bags — and plenty of other IP — to help Scopely reach its current $4.9 billion valuation. With O’Brien as chief revenue officer, Scopely has partnered with Marvel, Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount and WWE to develop their iconic characters and stories into games ready for your fingertips every day. The company has seen six gaming franchises surpass $1 billion in revenue each. But by far Scopely’s most high-profile and game-changing (pun intended) deal to date was the $3.5 billion acquisition of “Pokémon Go” and the rest of Niantic’s gaming division in May.
Jason Momoa, Keke Palmer and Chris Pratt star in the campaign for “Monopoly Go!”
Scopely
“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 forward, Scopely is interested in exploring further M&A — but more focused on building out its existing relationships with external brands and companies before it proceeds with its next
big 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 mobile game company in the U.S., Scopely has no greater competitor than itself in developing those franchises. But Driver says Scopely is uniquely positioned to handle that situation due to its varied offerings.
“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 multiple times 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.”