Why Mobile Gaming Has Seen Such Explosive Growth in a Decade

The numbers speak for themselves: 5 billion hours of gameplay in 12 months. That’s the going rate of business activity at Scopely, the mobile gaming giant behind such popular titles as “Monopoly Go!” and “Pokémon Go.”

Tim O’Brien, chief revenue officer of Scopely, traced the arc of mobile gaming’s rise as an economic force as well as serving as a wide funnel to draw consumers deeper into the medium of video games as an entertainment option.

The dawn of the iPhone in 2007 was really Year One for mobile gaming, although titles did exist before then, O’Brien told Jennifer Maas, Variety‘s senior business writer for TV and gaming.

“Things really took off when Jobs and Apple launched the original iPhone in 2007, which going back to that day, actually, it was a closed ecosystem. There was no app store when Apple launched the iPhone. That first year in 2007, which is when I became interested in gaming as a business, a team of coders cracked the phone,” O’Brien recalled. “What was phenomenal about that period of time is that a lot of consumers started jailbreaking their phones and they were not engineers. They were not hackers. Games that were being built then by developers — two or three, four-person shops were getting downloaded like hundreds of thousands of times.”

By 2008, Apple realized there was too much money on the table not to launch the App Store. The availability of free, easy to play games built for smartphone screens wound up turbo-charging all of gaming at a pivotal moment for the business, O’Brien said.

“The stats are that 15% of people will tell you they’re gamer, but 50% of people globally actually play mobile games. It’s a huge stat. But mobile gaming has transformed, I think, the entertainment industry. It’s become culturally the medium of choice where a lot of consumers want to spend their time. In the Scopely portfolio games that we have live today, in the last 12 months, we had 5 billion hours of gameplay.”

In 2014, shortly after O’Brien joined Scopely, he set a deal with Hasbro for a mobile game based on the classic board game Yahtzee. The business plan projected the game would generate $2 million worth of in-game purchases in the first year. “We did it in the first 30 days,” O’Brien said. “We immediately had the largest Yahtzee product they’d ever produced at Hasbro.”

Scopely was recognized this month by Variety as a Billion Dollar Brand.