If you’re not tired of hearing about the success of Monopoly Go, welcome to another article about it!
I can’t ignore the article I wrote when Monopoly Go just got released, and OH BOY, did I underestimate the brand's strength and well-built economy of this game.
It only proves my point that all these articles on games are nothing more than people trying to look smart by writing another piece about the game that is on everyone’s mind, building their own brand on the game’s popularity.
But hey, I’ve been playing the game a lot, and I like writing, so why not share? I hope it will be insightful to some of you after all.
My honest opinion is that nobody really knows how to recreate the magic of a successful game, and there are hundreds of little details that create the whole experience together, and it’s incredibly hard to figure them out.
However, in the case of Monopoly Go, there are a few key points that make it such a big success, and it’s hard to overlook them.
Let’s dive into it!
Casual Casino BOOM
Let’s take a look at the Casual Casino genre, games that, well, create a great mix of casino experience with casual style. Not the Vegas-type casinos that there are so many of.
Taking a look a year ago at this genre, we see Coin Master completely dominating with a couple of games that existed previously but were never able to scale to that degree: Dice Dreams & Board Kings.
Monopoly Go combined the Board Kings core experience, mixing it up with the strongest elements of Coin Master. At the end of the day, represented as a board game or slot machine, the true experience stays the same.
However, from the experience of an average casual player, a board game might be a much more appealing representation. In a way, it’s more trustworthy to play a game that everybody played as a kid with their parents and now as a parent playing with their kids than playing something that reminds them of losing money in Vegas while getting drunk on champagne.
And so, in less than a year since its Global Launch, Monopoly Go entered STRONG in the genre, practically taking around 60-70%. However, while it seemed to have a slightly negative effect on Coin Master, most of these players were new to the genre, which makes the entrance such a strong one.
Monopoly Go has disrupted not only the genre of casual casinos but also the whole mobile gaming industry.
How did they manage that?
Brand Magic
If you tried to make a new game or scale an existing one in the past few years, you’d know that the market is very different now. Many companies operated previously based on the assumption that if you make a good game, you can always find ways to advertise it.
Well, that’s not how it works anymore. When you build a game, you have to think about your user acquisition strategy. At the end of the day, your ROAS highly depends on your CPI. And most of the games that manage to scale now found their way to bring those CPIs down.
It is pointless to say how much many, including myself, underestimated the strength of the Monopoly brand. I don't know the official numbers, but it clearly brought the UA costs of that game to the ground.
Now, who knows if the CPIs were 5 times higher and the organic traffic wasn’t as strong, would the same game succeed, or would a company like Scopely even bother to launch it?
With the current market, most of the games out there have to advertise their games with misleading creatives. Poor freezing women & children, pull-the-pin puzzles, 4X games that look like endless runners with guns in their ads, we’ve seen it all.
And that works much better than advertising your game with the actual gameplay, even if many players leave immediately.
Now, take a look at the creatives that Monopoly Go uses, and you’ll see that they practically advertise, well, THE GAME in 100% of cases. Because the game is appealing by itself, there’s no need to hide it and disguise it as something else.
Almost unseen in our times for most casual games, but thanks to that and to the brand of Monopoly, not only Scopely gets laughably low CPIs but incredibly high retention since players are getting exactly what they say when they download the game.
While I admire the execution level of the game and the effort the team put into it, I believe most of the success in its current form comes from the brand of Monopoly.
That said, you can take a brand and botch the game execution pretty easily, so kudos to the team!
Just. Keep. Rolling. Dice!
I do not like to deeply analyze game economies with spreadsheets (unless I’m developing a direct competitor, hehe), so I want to take a look at Monopoly Go and how they create an endless loop of satisfaction for their players.
The strength of the gameplay of Monopoly Go is that while the game is random at its core, as a player, you still feel a sense of agency over it. You can calculate where you can land (2 to 12 tiles away from your current location), you choose how many dice to spend on each roll, and each time you “visit” your friends, you select cards in heists or which building to attack.
So the game makes you always choose something, giving you the feeling that you’re in control, which is a great feeling when games can achieve it.
However, you don’t control much, and it’s all about the luck of landing on the right tiles and getting those 3 ring icons when you’re performing a heist!
The gameplay boils down to launching an auto-roll, putting your phone on the table and reacting whenever you have to make a choice. But it doesn’t get boring. You’re motivated to make another step towards that SWEET PROGRESS.
As much as Match3 games monetize practically on a desire to PROGRESS NOW (well, and on a enormous loss aversion thanks to win streaks and various live ops), Monopoly Go does the same. Sure, there’s no loss condition, but you’re still motivated to get the next reward in the events, complete the collection, get more dice and keep rolling!
So, what’s great about the economy of Monopoly Go? The pillars, from my perspective, are:
Excruciatingly painful speed of the dice regeneration
Variety of sources that give you tons of dice to roll, including live ops
The roll multiplier, which allows you to bet higher
Rewards stuffed with stickers, stickers and some more stickers!
Variety of goals to pursue at all times
Let’s unpack it one by one.
Dice Regeneration
The base speed of gaining dice to roll is slow enough to basically allow you only to have 2 sessions a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. That sets the baseline expectation of how valuable the rolls are, making it much more appealing to purchase dice as you understand that even the most minor purchase is worth a day's dice regeneration.
Rewards
While regenerating very few rolls over time, you get hundreds and sometimes thousands of rolls from various sources throughout the game. I’ve been playing for a couple of weeks recently, and one day, I ended up earning 10,000 or more rolls without paying a single dime.
That was a fantastic experience that set a new standard of rolling x20 or even x50 at all times and made it feel like coming back to x3 was utterly inadequate.
Multipliers
The essential casino feature is that whenever you get those large rewards, you always play on higher bets because it would take too much time to play on x1 or x3 to spend hundreds of rolls.
But as I said, it’s all very habit-forming, and to feel the same “high,” you’re willing to pay to get those high rewards again!
At the same time, while on a global scale, the rewards distribution would be the same on x1 or x100, on the smaller scale, landing on the tiles like "Free Parking", "Just Visiting" or "Go to Jail" takes away a massive chunk from the potential payouts.
Stickers Albums
However, not all rewards across the game reward you with rolls. Many of them will be stickers. While this seems to be such a simple feature, albums, many casual games use this feature nowadays to fill the economy with rewards that don’t necessarily give you anything.
Sure, completing the album gives you rewards, and you can exchange stars from duplicated stickers for more rolls, but those are such rare occurrences that they don’t affect your day-to-day experience.
Goals to pursue
And lastly, it all cultivates in an endless pursuit of so many goals simultaneously, giving you that little shot of dopamine. Just look at this list:
3 Daily goals that help you complete the weekly goal
Usually, 3 live ops systems, two of which progress by landing on special tiles and the 3rd generally by having an additional currency that allows you to engage in a parallel activity/gameplay
Filling community chest with cash by landing on its tiles
Obtaining stickers to complete the albums, over time, earning new stickers starts to feel very rewarding as it becomes scarce
And, of course, the ultimate progression in the game, advancing in building your cities, which in turn populate your board with houses and hotels, which you later collect to get more free rolls or stickers!
But behind what seems like the ultimate progression, there’s hiding something else: your “Net worth.” It is a simple leveling system. However, it gives you enormous rewards and changes the game's pacing, unlocking more rolls capacity and faster regeneration. While it feels gratifying, deep down, you know it won’t change anything.
Pausing for a moment to appreciate the building part of the game, while there’s not too much to analyze, what’s important is how it affects the whole game progression. With exponentially increasing prices to complete the boards and rising, but not with the same speed, payouts, it takes longer and longer to complete each board, which makes it a rewarding experience for players to keep seeing the numbers increasing every day of their rewards, while still slowing down their ultimate progress.
It creates a positive experience of progression, and with the content being perpetually released, it creates a fantastic value for the players to convert. But more about it later.
The usual suspects, live ops
I mentioned Live Ops systems as one of the pillars of the economy, and indeed it is. The experience would’ve been entirely different without the staggered live ops rewards.
There are 4 main groups of events running concurrently in Monopoly Go almost always.
Solo goals event
It is the most straightforward event of them all, simply requiring players to land on different tiles, change every event, complete milestones and get rewards.
Players have to complete all milestones to get a grand prize. However, you have to be a big spender ever to get there.
Represented as one of the key UI elements, similar to the puzzle games, at the top of the screen.
Usually, it has a few days duration to create time pressure, but at the same time, it gives players the feeling that they’re getting closer to the grand prize, improving their motivation.
The players never know how far the grand prize is. They only know what’s inside.
Competition + solo goals event
Similar to the solo goals event, players must also complete milestones by landing on different tiles to a regular solo goals event and get rewards.
It has a leaderboard attached, where you’re matched with 99 other players and competing for the top places to get rewards at the end of the event.
These events usually last 1-2 days, giving players enough time to compete but not too long to get demotivated if you can’t compete with your current group.
In this one, everything is very transparent: you see the activity of other players, the number of milestones to be collected and the prize you’ll get for each place in the ratings.
It is a simple complimentary event that staggers its rewards on top of the solo goals event, allowing players to receive many rewards and have longer rewarding sessions.
It is crucial to the experience that you usually receive rewards for your placement when you open the game, making your first experience every 4-5 sessions even more rewarding if you’re an active player.
Unique Activity Event
These are only sometimes active, but still, the majority of the time, you can expect them to be on.
Usually, these events offer a player a unique way to interact with the game. A player gets an extra currency distributed in the game through rewards from the usual sources and can use this currency to engage in some kind of new gameplay.
It could be just a rewards wheel, but you play this event together with another player, so you both work towards the same goal and help each other get better rewards. It could be a “pachinko slot machine” kind of gameplay or an event emulating the Hidden Temple Treasure event from Royal Match, giving players the agency to choose which tiles to unravel to find objects beneath to collect rewards at the end.
The key here is that players now have an extra way to engage with the game, making the experience fresh and rewarding and allowing players to receive even more rewards.
These events must be the ones that generate the most robust engagement as they offer a variety of exciting experiences and change frequently.
Booster Events
Lastly, Monopoly Go is full of mini-booster events that last from 5 minutes to 1 hour.
These allow players to spend more rolls, get higher rewards for a minimal time, or engage in mini-games, such as cash grab.
They don’t meaningfully change the experience, but might be enough to give you a little push to spend more or to purchase some rolls to maximize the usage of these events.
Altogether, this live ops package is nothing you haven’t seen if you played casual games. There are multiple events to support player engagement, one that offers unique gameplay.
However, similar to Coin Master, in Monopoly Go, live ops create the dynamics of constant progression, generating extremely long and rewarding sessions that form habits for players and create a strong sense of missing out when players run out of rolls or when they come back to the usual amount of rolls that regenerated overnight.
Pay or get bored!
Honestly, there’s not much to say about monetization, as it builds on everything I discussed.
The key to monetization is not to shove offers in the player’s face. However, it helps, especially if offers have compelling value. And that is what it’s all about - compelling value.
You have to create a strong desire to buy something in the first place, and only then do you need to worry about optimizing the price points and the value inside the packages.
Monopoly Go does it exceptionally well with getting their players hooked on playing with high multipliers and desiring more rolls to extend the session, especially when they’re close to a big payout in one of the events, which will create a chain reaction.
Sometimes, buying 200 rolls might result in you getting 1000 rolls for free, which feels like a no-brainer for a player.
Regarding the offers, Monopoly Go always has 2 packages available on the home screen at lower and higher pricing points. They also have one or two endless offers screens available at all times, and of course, they have a variety of packs in the store, which you need to scroll through every 8 hours to get to your gift to claim. That’s low, Monopoly Go!
What if I have no friends!?
Social elements are a strong part of the game that definitely adds to its success.
If you’re playing with real friends, seeing their progress could be quite motivating to keep playing. At the same time, “social” for me is all about the vibe and how you feel while playing. If you see the people you know all the time, it adds more meaning to your every session. Similar to real life, engaging in something while being part of the community feels more important.
It does get more stale over time the more you play, but it still adds value, at least through features such as sticker exchange, which could be a game changer in your chances to complete the albums.
Last but not least, when Monopoly Go runs events, such as the recent one on St Valentine’s Day, you must choose 4 friends and collaborate individually with each of them to get and share juicy prizes. Now, that kind of social is a real game changer!
Nothing builds a stronger bond with the game than when you start a session and see your friend contribute tons of points towards the event, earning you hundreds of rolls. Now you feel like you have to pay them back!
I’m pretty sure we’ll see more strong social features from Monopoly Go moving forward.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, most of the success of Monopoly Go comes from solid branding and brilliant UA strategy with amazing creatives that advertise the gameplay itself.
These factors combined create the strongest hook for players to download the game that has presented itself at its face value when advertised, and they stay in the game thanks to its engaging progression and economy supported by ever-evolving live ops.
As a player, you see the brand that has survived for decades among board games, and it makes it fun, brings good memories and makes you confident that this game will last for long and is worth investing your time.
Everything that the Monopoly Go team could’ve done they’ve done and continue delivering by adding various new events and unique rewards, such as a joker card for the stickers albums just recently.
While the mobile market is going through its most challenging times, Monopoly Go is doing exceptionally well. Even though it may have reached its peak in the user base, it definitely hasn’t in its ability to monetize and accumulate long-tenured players.
Comments