Scopely Dealmaker Tim O’Brien Offers Bullish Outlook: ‘I Feel Like I Couldn’t Be in a Better Industry Right Now’

Scopely is the No. 1 mobile gaming company in the U.S. With titles like “Monopoly Go!,” “Stumble Guys,” “Yahtzee With Buddies” and “Star Trek Fleet Command,” the Los Angeles-based publisher has reached over 500 million Americans in the last six months.

According to Scopely’s chief revenue officer Tim O’Brien, much of that success is due to Scopely’s personal, privately owned environment, combined with the reach of its parent company, Savvy Games Group.

“Unlike the pressures of being a publicly traded company, you can come here with your creative talents, get tons of resources and global distribution,” O’Brien said. “It puts us in a really unique position to capitalize on market opportunities right now.”

As part of Variety‘s Entertainment & Technology Summit presented by City National Bank, O’Brien sat down with moderator Andrew Wallenstein, president and chief media analyst of the Variety Intelligence Platform, to discuss how Scopely has become the leader of the mobile games market.

The debut of “Monopoly Go!” in April 2023 was the largest mobile game launch in history. O’Brien explained that when Scopely was founded in 2011, the two main areas of focus were to produce a “diverse portfolio” of games and to tap into the market of licensed titles, which the Scopely team felt were “underutilized.”

“Hasbro is a great example of an early partner. We licensed ‘Yahtzee’ in 2015 and it was a tremendous success. It made more money than they’d ever made on the board game in the first year of its existence,” O’Brien said. “That led to a license with ‘Scrabble,’ and I think that the education process and the learning from those two games together enabled us to evolve the relationship into something like ‘Monopoly Go!’”

Although the games industry has experienced waves of layoffs in the last few years, O’Brien remains optimistic about the future of the business and emphasized his belief that “games are here to stay.”

“People continue to underestimate the size and scale and the amount of time spent in games,” O’Brien said. “I feel like I couldn’t be in a better industry right now. I know there are a lot of great industries, but we are in a really unique and great place right now.”

Watch the entire conversation above.