How Scopely made Monopoly a mobile success

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Scopely’s Massimo Maietti and Howard Shin joined Game Thinking’s Amy Jo Kim at the GamesBeat Summit to talk about how to reimagine IPs as successful games. The big secret? It’s almost not about the game at all.

That’s not entirely true, but it isn’t inaccurate, either. Maietti and Shin both work on Scopely’s Monopoly Go. Monopoly is an established thing. It’s been around in board game form for almost a hundred years. Monopoly is, if anything is, an institution.

So the problem isn’t in making a good game. The problem is how to, basically, translate that game. Monopoly the board game works … as a board game. Does Monopoly work as an app? Well, it already exists as a digital game. So the answer isn’t no. How, then, to make it unique? How to make it stand out, without losing its mass appeal?

“If you wanna make a game for a very sort of universal audience, as we’re finding today that the Monopoly audience is,” began Maietti. “Maybe making a game that has a high skill ceiling and is very complicated is not the right way to go.”

Maietti explains the path from beginning to end. Adding luck as an element to make the game more fun. Making the game asynchronous to let everyone play at their own pace. Adding social elements into the world so players can connect with each other, even when not directly playing together.

The most important, and most difficult lesson, according to Maietti, is in figuring out the thing people love and expanding on it.

“It’s about the multiplication of capital,” said Maietti. “You are rich, and you get richer. And it’s somewhat effortless, right? I’m rich enough to buy a hotel, people stop there