Quelle: Scoply
March 18, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. – At a cost of half a billion US dollars, the mobile game easily puts major AAA blockbusters in the shade. But this also applies to sales of over two billion dollars!
Although mobile games have long since arrived in the mainstream of society, opinions about “mobile phone games” are still divided. Developed cheaply and designed only to take money out of players' pockets – these are the prejudices of many hardcore gamers about mobile games.
Since the barrier to entry is low and almost everyone now has a smartphone, the games are still enormously successful, as ABK's reports show again and again. And games like Pokémon GO have also been able to catch up with “gamers” in recent years and at least prove that mobile games don’t always have to be just Candy Crush and the like.
An interview by Scoply with gamefile showed how successful mobile titles can be – and how expensive the costs are at the end of the day. Accordingly, some mobile phone games are barely behind a AAA blockbuster in terms of cost – even if the money flows into completely different channels.
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MONOPOLY GO! Who wants to become a multimillionaire today?
A new Free2Play board game for iOS and Android devices from Scopely: MONOPOLY GO! Play now & become the ultimate real estate tycoon! #advertising
The most successful casual mobile game
With over 2,000 employees, Scoply is a big player in the mobile games market and is responsible, among other things, for Star Trek Fleet Command and Scrabble GO. But by far the most successful horse in the stable is another: Monopoly GO.
According to its own information, Monopoly GO, which only came onto the market on April 11, 2023, Sales have now exceeded the $2 billion mark – these are spheres in which only “harcore mobile” games like Pokémon GO operate. This made Monopoly GO the most successful new mobile game in 2023.
But the interview answers about costs are almost even more exciting. Anyone who thinks that a mobile game like this can be cobbled together quickly and inexpensively is at least partly wrong. Although we don't know how high the development costs alone are, Monopoly GO cost Scoply around $500 million. The majority of this probably went into marketing to attract new players.
At the end of the day, a Free2Play mobile game can only be successful with many players. The players obviously like it, because the reviews in the Play Store are mostly positive and significantly better than most other major mobile games. And this despite the fact that many critics accuse the game of having an overly monetized gaming system.
Monopoly thus turns history on its head again. Once invented to show and denounce ever-increasing capitalism, Monopoly has become the most successful board game of all time. Thanks to countless licenses (for example World of Warcraft Monopoly), the board game is now the epitome of capitalism and money-making in the board game sector. And now the associated mobile game also joins this tradition.