Maximizing Monopoly Go's Second Chance

Monopoly Go has achieved instant success for Scopely, topping the US mobile charts in August despite a challenging market. In an interview with Scopely's GM of Monopoly Go and VP of product Massimo Maietti, he acknowledges the unfavorable market dynamics but believes Monopoly Go was well-suited to its launch landscape. Maietti notes that few brands have audiences that come into a game experience expecting to play with friends and family, and Monopoly is one of them. The team harnessed this built-in interest with a truly social game, making it suitable for everybody. The current version of Monopoly Go is not the original. The team initially worked on a synchronous PvP game that required skill and commitment but was hard to play with friends due to its real-time nature. Testing results suggested it could sustain a reasonable business but wasn't shaping up to be a big hit. The gameplay didn't fit the brand, as it felt like labor to get rich, rather than the Monopoly fantasy of getting richer by having money. The team realized they made the wrong game on a fundamental level and decided to go back to the drawing board. They re-envisioned Monopoly Go as an asynchronous event, focusing on social and viral hooks like its invite system. Maietti emphasizes that the game does not incentivize indiscriminate inviting of contacts; instead, it's a small group affair, and there's no benefit to having more people after six or seven. Maietti calls this a 'high-risk, high-reward' approach, which changed the way the company tested the game in soft launch. The team looked at whether the social elements were working, rather than individual KPIs and metrics. The results were promising, with the game taking hold of the market during its soft launch phase, something Maietti says is 'extremely rare.' The game's soft launch was nearly a complete experience, rather than a test to tweak and zero in on the full game experience. Maietti says the team validated what they were doing through internal playtesting and external user testing, which gave them confidence to keep the bar high. The results have been successful so far, but maintaining momentum is a challenge. Maietti believes it's no longer enough to have a great game design; a great structure around data and insights, as well as deeper integration between the game and marketing, is needed. Maietti also emphasizes the importance of communities, ensuring they are large and healthy, and the game team is embedded in the community. As part of Scopely, the Monopoly Go team can learn from other successful games like Stumble Guys, Star Trek Fleet Command, or Yahtzee With Buddies. Maietti wants to communicate to fellow game makers that there is hope, and through discipline and trust in the game-making process, it's still possible to deliver a successful game in the mobile market.