When Scopely Inc. began in 2011, the goal wasn’t so much to create a blockbuster game, but to develop a gaming platform and strategy that could seed and grow long-term franchises at scale.
Fifteen years later and Culver City-based Scopely has had quite the year. The company surpassed $10 billion in lifetime revenue in 2024 – $5 billion of which occurred in the 18 months. Its games have been downloaded more than a billion times, and its business model – which relies on long-term, enduring engagement – has driven most of that revenue.
Scopely’s co-chief executives Walter Driver and Javier Ferreira, as well as chief revenue officer Tim O’Brien, sat down with the Business Journal to discuss the challenges Scopely is up against as it continues to make waves in the mobile games sector.
What was the goal or the thesis for Scopely when you guys first started it, and has it evolved over time? Do you feel like your goals have changed for the company?
Driver: We started Scopely in 2011, so we’re coming up on our 15-year anniversary here in Los Angeles. I think one of the core things that we thought was that interactive entertainment experiences were going to become bigger, and we were going to unite people at huge scale. While L.A. has traditionally been known for more traditional forms of entertainment, we thought software was going to enable different kinds of creativity and allow players also to have a role in creating their own experience rather than just consuming something that was already created. We also thought that the advent of a smartphone was a really big deal and was going to make everyone a gamer because you don’t need to buy a console and you have it with you all the time. We thought there was a big opportunity to build a company that was bigger than any individual product but could systematically develop and launch and operate some of the best video games in the world that were free live services, which meant they would always evolve. So 15 years in, it turned out that mobile was a big deal, and video games and live services are bigger than ever.
I feel like Monopoly Go and Pokémon Go now are kind of bigger than the Scopely brand itself, and I’m curious about how you see Scopely playing a role in the overall gaming ecosystem. Do you see yourself primarily as a tech company, or
a media company?
Driver: I think that element of the players getting to have some agency and identity inside of experience makes it really powerful relative to just consuming content. We talked a lot at the beginning of the company about the shift from direct-to-consumer experiences to directed-by-consumer experiences where they get to play a role in authoring that and the community helps direct the experience for other players and it evolves a lot over time.
O’Brien: We’re both a technology and gaming company. We have a very strong technology stack with Playgami, too.
Playgami is interesting because in order to do what you guys do, I feel like you do need a very nimble technology platform that sits under all these games. Is Playgami the proprietary, put-a-moat-around-it piece of the company?
Driver: The thing about games is it’s both a creative industry, but it’s also a technology-driven enterprise as well. L.A. has been underrated as a place where those two things come together to create innovation for a long time. What Playgami does is it’s a lot of infrastructure that you don’t want to build over and over again to support some of the basic plumbing to make that a great experience. It enables our game teams and engineers to spend more time innovating on the player-facing parts of the experience rather than rebuilding all the backend infrastructure every time we build a new game.
As Scopely has grown, what would you guys say is the biggest bottleneck that the company is facing? It could be internal, or it could be external in the gaming ecosystem as a whole. Do you guys see anything that makes it harder for to reach certain goals?
Driver: I think one thing about the nature of the live services that we create is that they’re always on 24/7, 365 days a year and they’re evolving all the time. And so any time we launch a new game, it’s not a launch. It’s the beginning of a journey that goes on indefinitely. It has to change every day and every week and every month. We want to service all of our existing players and all of our existing games and that requires a lot of focus and resources and creativity. You can’t just add hundreds more products and expect to operate these live services in ways that are going to be compelling for audiences for decades to come.
O’Brien: But I think that’s one of the things that attracted me to mobile – the dynamic changing in the industry. It makes it fun and exciting, and if you have a strong strategy and a great group of people that are willing to kind of go to great lengths to be ahead of the market, it’s very interesting. There are a lot of older stable industries that aren’t evolving at the pace of ours. I want to be in this industry; it’s kind of the forefront of what’s happening with the entertainment media.
As a first mover in this space, how do you make sure that you’re investing your time in emerging technologies or formats without just throwing spaghetti at the wall? How do you make sure you’re properly investing in things that have teeth and futureproofing the company?
Ferreira: I think we’re always kind of trying to pay attention to players and not so much scale because, to your point, there might be technologies that don’t have the scale yet – they might be emergent, but are they really engaging players in a meaningful and profound way? I think the best kind of gaming experiences are not pastimes. They are true, emotional, high-intensity experiences and that’s true for a “Fortnight” player or for a Scrabble player or a “Monopoly Go” player or for a “Call of Duty” player.
Do you have any examples of hyped technologies that you kind of explored to see if they would be a viable thing to experiment with, but it sort of fell flat?
Ferreira: The word “hype” can have a negative connotation, which I would want to stay away from because sometimes it’s just a question of timing and platform evolution. I worked on mobile in the very early days before the smartphone. I think it’s similar with VR. I think the idea that VR gaming is going to be a thing, I certainly would bet against that. I would bet against that platform right now, but I don’t think there’s any hype in that idea.
Compared to maybe traditional games that are played on the console, what do you guys have to do differently in order to make live services happen? There are these logistical restrictions on the creativity itself.
Ferreira: I think what is different about the business that we’re in versus traditional console businesses is that the success of our products and the success of the business is built on players that are playing the game for years. Most of our revenue comes from players that have been playing our games for more than one and two years. Generally, the games business has had a lot of early engagement and then a lot of revenue upfront – day one, month one, even year one. The engagement model has been built more around that kind of initial burst whereas our business is really built on engaging with players over and over.
Driver: I think a lot of media businesses historically have been driven by the launch of new content, and this business is driven by the creation of enduring communities.
Are there specific genres that you want to use your tech platform for, that you want to crack that haven’t been cracked yet?
Ferreira: Yes, but mostly things that we cannot talk about right now right now. We are at a moment in the company’s history where we’re really leaning into high risk and high innovation kind of projects.
Well, is there an example you can give of a way you guys are trying to innovate and trying to push the platform to do something different?
Driver: With the acquisition of Pokémon Go, one of the things that’s really unique about that is that it brings people together in both digital and physical worlds. So, there were hundreds of thousands of people that come in person to Pokémon Go Fest. At the same time, there’s a lot that happens in the digital realm there, and we are trying to continue to innovate around how people’s experiences can kind of cross digital and physical boundaries.
O’Brien: I think that’s an important piece, because you’ve got world-class game studios, you’ve (got) this technology stack in Playgami, you’ve got this learning machine on top of it, and then the capability to go out and do at-scale M&A with a lot of capital behind us. We may not be able to build the technology or be ready to invest 10 years in the technology that Niantic had built, but we can definitely partner and acquire and then take those learnings.
