The numbers speak for itself: 5 billion hours of gameplay in 12 months. It’s the ongoing rate of business activity at Scopely, the mobile gaming giant behind popular titles like “Monopoly Go!”. “Pokemon GO.”
Scopely’s Chief Revenue Officer Tim O’Brien has acted as a broad funnel to track the arc of mobile gaming’s rise as an economic force and to draw consumers deeper into the video game medium as an entertainment option.
The 2007 iPhone Dawn was actually its first year for mobile games, but the title had existed by then, but O’Brien spoke to Jenni Farmers, a senior business writer at variety, to senior business writers in television and gaming.
“When (Steve) Jobs and Apple launched their original iPhone in 2007, things actually started. It was actually a closed ecosystem. When Apple launched their iPhone, there was no App Store. “What was phenomenal about that period was that many consumers started breaking into their phones and not engineers. They weren’t hackers. They were being built by developers.
By 2008, Apple realized that there was too much money on the table to not launch an app store. The availability of free and easy to play games built for smartphone screens allowed us to charge every game at an extremely instant, O’Brien said.
“The statistics say 15% of people are gamers, but it’s a huge statistic that actually plays mobile games worldwide. But I think mobile gaming has transformed into the entertainment industry. Many consumers want to spend their time.
In 2014, shortly after O’Brien joined Scopely, he signed a contract with Hasbro for mobile games based on the classic board game Yahtzee. The business plan predicted the game would generate $2 million worth of in-game purchases in the first year. “We did that in the first 30 days,” O’Brien said. “We had the largest Yatzi product they’ve ever produced at Hasbro.”
Scopely was recognized as a $1 billion brand this month by Variety.
