MarketWire | Let me be clear: Monopoly Go is "successful"
MarketWire | Let me be clear: Monopoly Go is "successful"
Let's talk nuance in the games industry and "no more drama"!
What’s up Gamemakers!
This week, I try to navigate being respectful to one of the biggest and most successful games of 2023, Scopely’s Monopoly Go!, while still keeping it 100%.
There has been some drama swirling around my friend and someone who I really enjoy collaborating with: Matej Lancaric from 2.5 Gamers.
While I generally try to avoid drama, I also believe it’s important to talk about deep industry topics, especially those often misunderstood by many game industry folks. Hence, I took the risk of having some people get mad at me, but with the hope and intention of raising the profile of an important industry topic.
Against this backdrop, I recorded a podcast and co-wrote a blog post with Matej.
Podcast:
Blog post:
One of the themes that Arthur Trusov and I talk about from time to time on the GameOver podcast (with almost zero audience on YouTube, lol) is the continuing effects of the lessons that were not learned post-Covid about overexuberance, straight-line extrapolation, and the practices of game studios to window dress forecasts and even historical performance.
Anyway, for context, I’m not sure of the full origin story behind the drama, but Matej has questioned the profitability of Monopoly GO! (I also mentioned the same question - note it was a question, not an assertion - in one of our first collaborations last year; see below). That’s not to say that the game is bad or isn’t successful; it has amazing success and is a game that Scopely should be proud of.
My main point behind doing a podcast and co-writing a blog post with Matej on this topic was to try and get more people to understand the deeper nuance of the games industry, especially behind the word “profit.”
At the bottom of the newsletter, I have some closing thoughts on this topic; moving forward, I would like to not talk about this anymore. Lol.
Top 10 Charts
The Royal Match vs. Monopoly Go battle continues for #1 top revenue!
OMG, y’all gotta check out Help Me: Tricky Story. How do you gain over 500K downloads in 1 week just on Google Play? By making a game about bowel movements, having a bee sting someone in the buttocks, removing pimples, etc. I am not surprised it’s not on iOS, as I assume approvals would be difficult.
Finally, congrats to Gametion for hitting the top 10 downloads from Ludo King again. The game is on its way to getting to 1B in cumulative downloads, the vast majority of which comes just from India.
Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat seems to have incredible production value but is not getting great reviews from Youtubers. Let’s keep an eye on this and try to understand any lessons we can take away from its launch.
As typical for China market, we see new games “surge” in downloads and hit Top 10.
白荆回廊 from Tencent is a beautiful, anime-style tactics RPG game
天境传说 from Glacier is a team battle/idle RPG game
Top 10 Mobile Publishers
Top 10 Steam Games
It's great to see Apex Legends making a comeback. EA reported in May of 22 that the game made over $2B in lifetime bookings at the time. It’s crazy to think how much more money the game will make over its eventual lifetime.
While there have been some reports of underperformance by Apex in 2023, it’s awesome to see it back on top, at least on Steam.
Liveops for F2P games is difficult. For those of you who want to learn more about how to do it well, check out the podcast from one of the greatest games of all time - League of Legends - and how they do it below:
🔦 Spotlight | Monopoly Go is a great success
Alright, so first of all, I’m not sure why some people are so offended at questioning the profitability of this game. Also, I’m not sure about this $1.5B spend for Monopoly Go that people say I’m defending. I’m not even sure where that number came from. I didn’t read whatever blog post that came from, but Matej clarified his opinion on that in our podcast.
If I were to do a UA spend estimate as a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, here’s what I would do - and to be clear, I haven’t done it:
Take data.ai estimates on paid v. organic and use that as an estimate across geos.
Take data.ai estimates on geographic concentration and multiply geo installs x paid ratio x avg. CPI estimate by geo at scale. Matej mentions some estimates he got from friends in the industry doing fairly scaled campaigns in the US, which would be the biggest cost driver.
For geos, to simplify, I would probably do 1. US, 2. Tier 1 excluding US, 3. Tier 2, and 4. Tier 3.
Let’s be clear, as I’ve stated over and over and over again. Scopely should be very proud of their game, and it’s clearly a huge success. Also, when I collaborated with Matej on discussing this topic, AGAIN, my main focus was to discuss the problems in defining profitability for a game and trying to explain the nuance rather than trying to cast stones at anyone.
In our collab podcast, Matej and I mentioned that we both believe the game is likely to break even and be profitable depending on the time horizon of payback.
However, let me leave this topic with three open questions, and then I’d like not to discuss this anymore. Also, I won’t respond back to some of the haters coming my way.
I can only say I’m sorry if I offended you; that was not my intention.
Question 1: Why would Savvy want to operate Monopoly Go for profit rather than scale when one of their professed objectives is to acquire more scale with plans to potentially deploy an additional $30B for scale? Does $30.2B or even $31B instead of $30B matter to them?
Question 2: How are people determining profitability for the game?
Let’s take an example of different people even within the games studio in which they work who are trying to understand the profitability of a game:
If you are a Games PM and get your KPIs report, let’s say a compendium of KPIs, that covers base KPIs, including D7 Recoup, you don’t have enough data to make a determination.
If you are a UA manager and someone else gave you your DX UA proxy metric to adjust your budget for profitability - even if you are hitting your targets, you don’t have enough data to make a determination.
If you are an exec looking at a forecast based on a long-time-horizon payback window and haven’t checked all of the assumptions made in the P&L forecast model, you don’t have enough data to make a determination. In fact, how often have execs not only not known but basically told some strat/planning PM: make the forecast show X…
Question 3: Why get angry and not just have an open discussion?
Trust me, I’m in no place to criticize anyone. I’ve got my own problems to worry about!
I’m also wrong about stuff all the time. More than happy to be proven wrong, in which case, I would be happy to admit it. For example, I dramatically underestimated the success of Fortnite on mobile during its initial launch, given its lack of low-end device support at the time.
When Monopoly Go first launched, a number of folks in the UA industry were a bit surprised by the aggressiveness of the marketing, which would make questioning the approach seem fairly reasonable. Monopoly Go was (and is) likely one of the most scaled, if not the most scaled, buyer in the mobile games industry. That’s a lot to be proud of.
Anyway, again, Monopoly Go is a great success. However, defining profitability is a bit problematic, and it can sometimes be difficult to determine for F2P mobile games, especially those with long payback periods in which much human judgment goes into models to forecast profitability.
In all cases, good luck to anyone out there who, like me, is trying to succeed. Happy for anyone successful out there, and it’s as hard as ever in mobile gaming right now, so any success should be complimented!
Anyway, I hope you don’t hate me, and if you stop being angry, hit me up. At some point, I would be more than happy to talk again about this topic especially over drinks at one of my private game industry dinners.