Monopoly GO'ne MAD! Exposing the Skinner Box in Your Pocket.
Monopoly GO is truly a casino in disguise
Remember this scene from the movie ‘They Live?’
If only we had the magic spectacles to spot the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the Monopoly GO maker wouldn't have slyly pocketed $2 billion in less than a year…
In a world of illusions and temptations lies a silent predator that promises you connection but thrives on deception: Monopoly Go, the latest mobile app of the classic board game. So it seems.
The industry hails it as a phenomenon, as this free game made over $2B in under a year. But this staggering amount didn’t come from game sales, but instead from its nearly 8,000,000 daily players or payers, spending money inside of it….
They don’t know that this ‘board’ game is in fact a cunningly calculated system designed to hook and deceive. This isn’t just a tale of a mobile game; it’s the story of millions of players not realizing that beneath this “phenomenal board game” lie the mechanisms of a casino gaming giant.
The studio behind Monopoly Go - Scopely - made its first headlines when it made $1B in lifetime revenue just 7 months after launch - a feat only matched by Pokemon GO. Now at $2B, the press celebrates it as a mobile game that made history. Never mentioning any comparisons to casino gaming. Hasbro - who owns the Monopoly brand - is sending congrats. And Scopely too congratulates the hardworking team of “Scopeleans”, in the typical corporate make-believe charade. After 7 years in the making and 250+M downloads later, it’s making about $4M a day, more than a traditional casino. All respectable numbers when looking at how fiercely competitive the mobile gaming market is.
With $90B, it accounts for half of the global games market. China is leading, followed by the US and Europe. With 60% of Americans playing mobile games, it’s not surprising to see that the US is publishing most of them. Fast forward, and we’re swimming in options. Half a million games on Google Play, another 200k on the App Store. No wonder mobile gaming has the highest consumer spending in the world. And Monopoly Go is killing it, consistently ranking top three in the US. Surprisingly, those who are playing and paying are mostly the older demographics. You might think it’s the familiar and nostalgic Monopoly brand that pulls these folks in. But digitizing Monopoly has been done many times before: From tycoon to solitaire and sudoku, nothing hit like Monopoly Go. So what’s its secret? How could a seemingly innocent board game make $2B in just 10 months? To find out, I needed to roll the dice a bit further back and understand what is it about this brand to begin with…
She named it the “The Landlord’s Game,” the precursor to Monopoly. Stenographer Lizzie Magie invented and patented a simple board with rectangles, “Go to Jail” and “Public Park.” With two sets of rules, players collect and spend money. Her mission with this game was to teach the 99% about income inequality. Back in her day, the US was deep in the Gilded Age, with capitalism as THE economic system. It was marked by industrialization and the rise of monoplies controlled by only a few*.* So Lizzie created the game to show the dangers of capitalist monopolies. Fast forward, and she eventually sold her patent to Parker Brothers for just $500. Renamed to Monopoly, the game sold 2M copies in 2 years, each at two bucks. 30 years later, and Hasbro steps in.
Best known for Mr. Potato Head.
When they acquired Parker Brothers, they basically took over the board game world. By the late 90’s, they owned 85% of the market. Twister, Scrabble, Risk, Clue, Dungeons & Dragons - all Hasbro. Hasbro was a monopoly itself, in a board game market that’s raking in cash. However, they paused creating new games. Why bother when you can just build on the existing Monopoly brand? After chess, Monopoly is the most played game, holding the Guinness World Record for being played by half a billion people. So expanding on that flagship brand was a no-brainer. It’s cheaper than building new games, and just as lucrative. That’s why Monopoly has every theme you can think of. Even a Monopoly movie with Kevin Hart is in the talks. And that strategy on doubling down on that flagship brand pays off. Hasbro mastered brand extension so much so, mobile gaming was the inevitable next step.
In 2015, Hasbro made a smart move. They partner up with Scopely, who is by then already big in mobile gaming. Together they first launched the only officially licensed Yahtzee game, which hit 1M downloads in just four days. Scopely isn’t new to this game. Their track record of #1 mobile games is long and loaded, with hit after hit, so much so it proppelled them to #9 on Inc.’s list of the fastest growing companies in America. Among their long list of investors we find big names like Arnold Schwarzenegger and former CEO of Paramount Pictures.
And even Ellen couldn’t resists partnering with them.
By 2019, they smashed past $1B in revenue and expanded globally acquiring studio after studio. And then, in 2023, they hit a jackpot twice: a $4.9B acquisition by Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group and one week later, their launch of Monopoly GO. Hasbro therefore found in Scopely their ideal partner in crime.
But how does this crime unfold? The classic board game is known as a family game that can last hours. To best translate this into a mobile game, Scopely simply looked at the #1 social casino game that got it all figured out: Coin Master. 100M global downloads, $3B lifetime revenue and still making a ton of cash.
In Coin Master, you hit the infamous big red button to spin slots. In Monopoly GO, you hit a big red button to roll dice. In Coin Master, you build in a themed city with your virtual money. Monopoly GO? Same idea—create landmarks to progress to new cities. In Coin Master, you then destroy others’ landmarks or steal from them. Monopoly GO? Same thing. Attack, destroy, or steal.
And that’s basically it. Smash button, roll dice, build, attack, steal, repeat. That’s the core loop of Monopoly Go. And the heart of the game - rolling dice. Just like in the board game, but quicker. For god’s sake, you can even set it to auto-roll, don’t have to do sh**. OHHH Keep rolling, but I am out of dice. 5 rolls, in 18 minutes, but if I don’t want to wait I can pay. 13 bucks. No thanks.
The twist? It’s all time bound.
Deals on the left, game modes on the right, daily events, the amount of dice - all attached to timers. The game is a race against the clock. First, it makes you feel lucky nearly all the time. You get hooked to the dopamine loop, dice after dice. And then, suddenly, you’re out of dice. Want more? Please pay. Or wait 12h. It’s your call. But, that’s how it hooks you. Just like I hooked you with my YT intro. This is far from the board game it advertizes to be. This is a thoughtful reconstruction of a slot machine, using dark patterns and stimulations you find only in casinos. It’s a Skinner Box. In your phone. A dopamine simulator. Rolling dice? That’s you pulling the arm of a slot machine. This addictive nature, however, is only one thing. What really makes this game so successful are the social elements. It seamlessly integrates with Facebook so that you can nudge your friends to become fellow addicts. Together, you can trade stickers for your sticker album, a feature that simulates progression. And people do anything to complete their sticker albums, from rolling more dice to paying strangers real money. FB even has a dedicated offical trading group, where 8M members are desparately losing it over stickers. No surprise, knowing that FB is very popular with the older demographics. Some people spend their entire day on multiple devices to chase the unchasable. The game also tells you who attacked or stole from you, all to entice you to retaliate and roll more dice so you can attack back. It’s a back and forth that can keep on for weeks, if not months. On the app store, it masquerades as a board game, cleverly sidestepping any association with social casino apps. Its packaging sells you all the classic board game features, but once inside, none of these matter. No buying properties or placing down houses. The rent collection is fake and you don’t actually challenge your friends. As you progress, everything gets more expensive, too. It taks more time to complete levels or replenish your dice. For impatient players, this can be a wallet drain. On Reddit, I read how much people are spending on the game. It ranges. From modest amounts to jaw-dropping sums, all the way to “too much for sure.” Some are straight-up calling it what it is: A Ponzi scheme. Pointless. Garbage. A complete scam. And some are as baffled as I am.
But yes, people are paying. In the industry, these payers are refered to as Whales. A term applied to people who spend hundreds of thousands on IAP. A while back, a video made the rounds, exposing the predatory tactics mobile games use to milk these whales. In the video, the guy explains how monetization happens in three stages, from hook, habit to hobby:
“The hook is what gets you into the game to try out a free-to-play game then you build it into a habit that you play multiple sessions every day and then at the end it's the Hobby phase where where people see it as their one of their main hobbies and they put lots of time and resources into it.”
While the industry calls them whales, to Scopeley, they are “regulars.” The more regulars, the more it confirms that you have a “sticky game.” After all, Scopely wants their games to “become ingrained in your daily life and part of the routine.” That’s a tough pill to swallow knowing that the game’s age rating is 9+ on the App Store and marked “everyone” on Google Play. Despite this, Scopely says “None of our games are targeted to kids, they're for a general audience.” Yeah right, general audience my ass
And that general audience costs Scopely. A lot. Around $500 million in marketing and user acquisition alone - as much as a AAA game dev budget. Their marketing approach is aggressive but that’s not surprising, given how long it takes for people to install a game: 36% need several days of ad exposure to install the game and another month to make their first purchase. For their mobile game The Walking Dead, their marketing was so intense, they even flew out a makeup artist to zombify PewDiPie for a play session, hitting 4M views. So when Scopely launches a game, their marketing goes deep and broad. Deep with viral social campaigns, broad with TV and social media ads. Their ad campaigns usually come in four flavors:
Ads based on IP show the familiar board to target Monopoly fans.
Ads based on wealth & upgrades targeting those interested in progression
Ads on social interactions targeting those looking for a social edge.
And lastly, there are tons of payed influencer ads
These ad campaigns usually run for 1-2 years before they pay off. The idea is to create a long-lasting flywheel effect, sth I mentioned in my Palworld video, where the end goal is to get players bring in more players. Not ads. But until then, agressive ad campaigns are effective. This strategy isn’t unique to Monopoly Go. Coin Master really pushed that envelope when you suddenly saw J.Lo and Cardi-B pressing that juicy red button.
Spending a lot on celebrities fits right into the social casino world, a billion-dollar scene. Unlike real casinos, though, social casino games aren't really regulated. Real casinos have to watch out for players with problematic gambling behavior and are required to step in, and face fines if they don’t. Social casino games however lack strict safeguards against addiction. There's no obligation for these games to monitor excessive gambling. This lack of regulation means players, especially those prone to addiction, are less protected. Given that social casino apps are up to five times more addictive than traditional games, it’s also much harder for players to just delete the app.
And so Monopoly Go is a perfect example of a social casino app done right, but for all the wrong reasons. It mixes casual play and board game nostalgia, cleverly concealing any casino undertones. It's packed with social features and hits every dark gambling trick in the book. On darkpattern.games, a website reviewing additcitve mobile games, Monopoly GO, falsely labled as a family board game, is on the naughty list. It ticks off every box for manipulative design, from temporal and monetary to social and psychological. Governments are starting to notice how these free-to-play games make their money and they're not happy. Belgium has already banned loot boxes that rely on chance, and the UK's looking into it as well. Over in the US, where Scopely sells big, there's talk of tightening the rules on buying things in games, especially for kids. The real toll, though, is on the players who got caught up and now regret it. They talk about the struggle to quit or “the time they’ll never get back.” The facade of Monopoly Go might be crumbling, as more players catch on to the game's true nature. But there's still fresh meat coming in every day, meat that is unaware of the hidden dark cycle they’re entering.
So, isn’t it ironic? The original Monopoly, designed to warn against capitalism, has now a billion-dollar mobile version that’s thriving on the very capitalism it meant to critique. How have we come to embrace, even celebrate, the monopolistic practices once warned against? Alas, it looks like we've turned into what we were supposed to avoid - becoming pawns in the game. On Scopely’s website, they are boasting big. #1 mobile board game. 6B jail visits, 13 quintillion earned. Their Co-CEO writes that the game is a “tangible reminder that there is much to celebrate and the games industry always finds the light.”
The only ‘light’ I see is them cashing in on addiction. This game is a tangible reminder of one thing only: In the end, the house always wins. Happy Gambling.