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Three reasons for Monopoly Go's success

Tuesday, 11th of February 2025, 21:21 +01:00

It's been almost two years since Scopely's megahit released globally, after which the game rapidly shot to the top of the revenue charts. In the third quarter of its lifetime, Monopoly Go (MoGo) raked in $800M in revenue. At the moment, lifetime revenue estimates float around $2.5B. Nothing to sneeze at, one could say! It's a big pile of money, but (especially because the game is licensed), a year ago there has been quite a bit of speculation whether the game was actually profitable. A few months later, SVP of marketing Jamie Berger contacted PocketGamer.biz to "put this argument to bed", so let's not dwell on that question and - as Jamie rightfully suggests - focus on the more important question: which mechanics are in place to make this game such a success?

To have a base for discussion, let's first look and compare a few KPIs with other casual unicorns to benchmark, to see how MoGo is performing.

First, let's start with retention. How does MoGo hold up compared to the other hot shots?

Lifetime retention metrics of some of the biggest mobile games. | Source: AppMagic

It seems like it depends who you ask (as retention estimates are a complex beast) but in the table above it doesn't look like retention is specifically MoGo's strongest KPI. This might not come as a big surprise, as it arguably takes a specific kind of player to engage with a core mechanic that (at its surface) offers so little player agency.

What about virality? Moon Active, developer of MoGo's biggest Casual Casino competitor Coin Master acquires about half of its players organically and the other half from paid channels (including a surprisingly high 17% from browser-based sources like Facebook and their own web store).

MoGo shows similar numbers on web (without having such a dedicated store), but has 10% more organics - maybe coming from its IP - making it end up at a 60/40 split between organics and paid traffic flocking to it. It's good, but nothing too crazy. For example, Candy Crush Saga has a 81/19 split and most Supercell games boast 90/10 ratios. Granted, these comparisons are a little unfair, given the way these specific games are so ingrained in today's society.

For that matter, let's look at Royal Match and Whiteout Survival as well, as these two games have been buying huge shares of ad placements across all networks for a good while now. Interestingly, both these games have about a 40/60 split, which is getting to the ballpark of hybridcasual games like Voodoo's Mob Control. It's always better to not be dependent on UA, so in short: MoGo is doing well in terms of organics, but it's far from a USP either.

So what is that magic KPI that makes MoGo such a success? You might have guessed it already: It's the Revenue per Download. One of the things MoGo does best is converting players. It's particularly unsurprising when you consider the game's theme and how it stays true to its IP and promotes the fantasy of becoming Jeff Bezos' spirit animal.

Worldwide, MoGo is by far the most impressive with a whopping $14.50 cumulative (lifetime) RpD. Surprisingly, Coin Master (and a few others) are still performing better in western Tier-1 countries. Unsurprisingly, MoGo doesn't do well at all in Tier-1 eastern countries (Japan has Itadaki Street and Korea has Blue Marble as their own local Monopoly variants) while Coin Master is still very much killing it over there!

Cumulative RpD comparisons with other casual unicorns. | Source: AppMagic

For a casual game though, holy smokes! MoGo's $14 RpD is on par with 4X conqueror Whiteout Survival! (which has a similar-looking RpD graph by the way)

Now let's dive a little deeper and identify some of the design choices MoGo developers have made to ensure the game is such a sticky and highly seductive experience. These are the reasons why about 2 million players -especially those with Power & Completion motivations - find themselves urging to come back every day. Some of the design choices are nothing new, as they have also been seen in MoGo's spiritual predecessor Board Kings (throwback to one of the first articles on this website back in 2019).

1. Frequent and extremely short-term live-ops

As it seems, most of the time, MoGo has four structural spots for live-ops it fills up:

  1. Main Event
  2. Leaderboard Event
  3. Minigame Event
  4. Flash Event (optional)
The structural rotation of different events. In the left image, the numbered slots correspond with the numbers above.

The Main Event determines the bigger theme of the current live-ops assortment and gives structural rewards, which are more than generous. As you can see above, they often provide big amounts of rolls that extend the session substantially and therefore enable unlocking a good chunk of content.

The Leaderboard Event bands a group of players together and makes them compete for a huge amount of rolls. The top-3 is often awarded a 4-digit amount of rolls. The catch is that it's practically impossible to score high in these events without dropping a few bucks to get more rolls. This means that players first have to commit and pay, then do everything they can to end up in the top, and then get their reward, allowing them to splurge thousands of rolls and progress a few worlds at once. Often, progressing through milestones in the Leaderboard Event also grants in-between rewards like extra rolls or sticker packs.

As the name suggests, the Minigame Event offers a varied array of different minigames to engage with. Here too, the rewards that can be collected are not to be ignored. Milestones often offer hundreds of rolls for players to extend their session and keep bouncing around the board. In case you are wondering: the three minigame screens below correspond with the three different live-ops overviews in the image above.

From ice picking to pachinko to toy decorating. Monopoly Go has it all.

It's important to note that these three events don't have to end at the same time. It can be that a minigame event stays on while the main event disappears and vice versa. This creates an interesting strategic dynamic of live-ops for players to navigate ("do I keep my rolls for when this event flips or do I rush all of them now and then some"). Lastly, different iterations of the same kind of event have different lengths as well. Sometimes a Leaderboard Rush event only takes a day or so, while other times it makes players compete against each other longer for bigger rewards.

Then lastly there are Flash Events, which as the name suggests are only there for a short time. Sometimes they pop in for only a few minutes! This means these events are unscheduled and therefore don't adhere to the general theme of the other three events and are configured to pop in at any time.

Flash Events offer players that little extra strategy.

All of these events have the added benefit that they make the bad or boring tiles on the board feel good. Normally the Taxes, Jail, Free Parking and such are bad tiles to land on, as they don't make the player earn any funds or even lose some. To counteract this, most events use these tiles to trigger event progress or collect progression currency for it. No frustration allowed!

The boatload of live events Monopoly Go is running. | Source: AppMagic

2. No way to get more rolls but pay

Players who run out of rolls but still feel the urgent need to continue rolling - because they committed to e.g. winning a tournament - will find themselves going through a thought process that's similar to the following:

   A. Oh no, I'm out of rolls! (let me first close these three pop-ups that always pop up at this point)    B. Am I close to any big milestones that could provide me with more rolls? (checks Main & Leaderboard Events)    C. Ah, I still have Minigame Event currency. Let's now deplete that and hopefully my progress there will award me some more rolls! (half of the time it does)    D. Oh darn! I kinda want to keep playing... What's this Pack?    E. Hmm, just 3 euros? Maybe I should...

The player's thought process at the end of each session.

It's easy to see how the constantly changing live operations from the first point create new ways every session to game the system and get some more rolls out of it. But for that, the player needs to feel like they have agency when they still have rolls to play. This is where the next point comes in:

3. That casino-like level of agency and rewards

Long-term readers of this site might recall the explanation of players being able to place landmarks in Board Kings and why this added a strategic element to its gameplay. Back then, this example was even illustrated using the orange streets in Monopoly! Talk about some foresight!

TL;DR: The example talks about the orange properties in the classic Monopoly board game giving the highest value as its tiles are located 6, 8, and 9 tiles past the jail. In the board game, the jail is the place where players end up the most (due to Chance cards or the police officer). The orange properties are the tiles on the board players have the highest mathematical chance of visiting when rolling with two dice after coming from the jail.

MoGo has perfectly hooked into allowing this strategic, 2-die rolling experience by removing all other bits of agency but the roll multiplier, allowing the player to focus entirely on that. For example: players are not actively placing landmarks like in Board Kings. Instead, MoGo places rent collection badges of other players at random spots on the board.

The crux is that the roll multiplier doubles all rewards of whatever is the outcome of the tile that was landed on. The most strategic players will check what is happening 6-8 or 5-9 tiles away and if it looks promising, they will increase their roll multiplier. If it's not (e.g. they are on the "cheap" two lanes of the board), they can put it to 1x. This min-maxing of bet and potential payout comes very close to the feeling you get in the casino.

Future prospects deserve increased potential!

The most beautiful additional advantage of MoGo's roll multiplier is that it allows players to have a lot of control over the length of their session. This is a huge advantage that cannot be underestimated. The fact that players are still able to log in and quickly consume their rolls at moments they don't have a lot of time makes this game easily revisited and every amount of extra rolls a celebratory moment. It's the complete opposite feeling of playing Archero where players will often experience rounds that take so long that they will start considering running into some enemies and die, as their session is dragging on way too long already.

The perfect game?

The points above are elementary parts of MoGo's success, but they are not the sole reasons for this game to work. While no game is perfect, a well-designed game is a complex and interconnected set of features and triggers seamlessly working together. Monopoly Go is definitely well on its way, but before closing this piece, there is one thing that deserves some attention, and that's its social interactions. Specifically its mix between social competition and collaboration, because this is one of the things about Scopely's moneymaking machine that could definitely be made a little more interesting.

In the article linked at the start of this piece, Jamie Berger states that MoGo "successfully tapped into the social component" of the game. While it's true you can connect with your friends in-game using a friend code (or Facebook), the social interactions in the game are a little limited. The game does feature the occasional, time-limited Partner or Tycoon Racers minigame events.

A collaborative effort?

The one notable and permanently available feature on the collaborative side is the Community Chest, which is a feature that is replicable so easily that it's surprising we don't see more implementations of it elsewhere.

The idea is simple: Once a day, the player is able to open a chest, but before that, they have the chance to multiply its contents. Players press a button to trigger a "random" selection of 1 of 9 tiles. If a tile with a friend is selected, the chest's contents go up one multiplier tier. If a key is selected, the chest is opened at the currently selected multiplier. The more friends a player has, the higher the chance to multiply 8 times and reach the final tier with the 50x multiplier.

While very good, it's hard calling this feature "social", as it features no player interaction whatsoever.

Did someone say stealing?

The competitive side features the example of the Bank Heist and Shut Down mechanics (which get triggered when visiting a Station tile) which get stale quickly because it suffers from a lack of variation. The amount that a player receives when shutting down someone else's landmark does not depend on the other person's current cash balance, it depends on the stealing player's progress. On the other side, the victim player gets deducted a very small amount based on their current balance.

None of these players received 33.2K

This means that the gained and diminished amounts for both players are different. And while this is quite logical, as being able to steal billions from a highly progressed player would ruin the game for the player that just got started, but at least adding some variation in returns (depending on the victim's actual cash balance, for example) would definitely make this mechanic more interesting. In Board Kings, when landing on a Steal tile, the amount you can steal does scale based on the opponent's actual cash balance. The more money someone has, the more can actually be stolen.

In MoGo there are only two outcomes: the player has shields and blocks your attack, or they don't and you steal more. While it is fun to find that one friend who has no more shields and repeatedly shut down their buildings while they are sleeping is quite fun, it does get old fairly quickly because their actual cash balance is not visible and the amount you receive is the same every time.

We all have that one friend...

They had one job (and nailed it)

As we all know, adapting anything from a different medium and not screwing that up is immensely difficult. Making the adaptation even better than the original is even harder, but Scopely actually pulled that off with Monopoly Go. The original Monopoly is an intentionally broken game that takes 3 hours to complete, and when someone finally wins, no one is really happy. Monopoly Deal is already a much better experience, and as the digital adaptation of the IP, MoGo succeeds with flying colours.

It's an especially terrific product because of its impeccable theme/gameplay fit. The player fantasy is exactly that of the original board game and works perfectly together with the betting core mechanic. On top of that, the game's live-ops knocks the ball straight out of the park. It will be exciting how Scopely will attempt to keep it relevant for the years to come.

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