Monopoly Go has been out for less than a year and has already earned $2 billion in revenue while spending $500 million just on marketing.
I have to admit that I had no idea what Monopoly Go was until I saw this headline in Stephen Totilo’s Game File newsletter: “The $2 billion success of Monopoly Go, the world's hottest phone game”. It turns out that the mobile adaptation of the legendary board game is one of the biggest games in the world, and I have never heard about it and I don’t know anyone who plays it.
Javier Ferreira, co-CEO of developer and publisher Scopely, recently announced that the game has earned over $2 billion in revenue since launching in April 2023. Which makes the game the most successful mobile title of last year, and it's only set to continue in this trajectory, boasting over 10 million daily players.
Monopoly Go Is The New King Of Mobile Gaming
In the interview with Game File, senior v.p. of publishing Eric Wood explained how this massive success came to be. The key to the success? You gotta spend money to make money. Wood reveals the staggering fact that Scopely spent a whopping $500 million for the marketing of the game alone.
To put that into context: this trumps some of the most expensive game budgets in the AAA sector, like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 ($315 million) or Cyberpunk 2077 ($442 million). Just for marketing. And I still somehow have never heard of this game! Any AAA video game publisher dreams of these types of numbers. It goes to show how massive and lucrative the mobile market has become and how successful games like Monopoly Go and Honkai: Star Rail can become, if done right.
What Scopely invested the money in was a “hyperlocal” approach to selling Monopoly Go around the world. The company produced highly-specific, localized marketing for every region the game is available in. You don’t need to be a marketing executive to know how ambitious and costly that is. But, the bet definitely paid off for them.