Monopoly Go! - The Not Obvious Lesson

Scopely recently announced that Monopoly Go! has reached the $1 Billion revenue mark – an astonishing accomplishment, considering it’s only been seven months since global launch.? Performance at that scale is impossible without world-class execution at all levels – beyond the game itself, the infrastructure and deployment challenges are non-trivial, and the UA spend has to have been truly phenomenal.? The license itself is, of course, an invaluable asset – the massive goodwill that people have, the strong memories of playing with friends and family – not just any title can achieve this kind of resonance.

But, I want to take you into the way-back machine.? Before there was a billion-dollar-a-year game, before there was even a publicly available game, before there was a soft launched version of the game, before there was an alpha version of the game, before there was any fun to be had, there was a concept for what the game was going to be.

In the beginning was the onion.? Back when Massimo first pitched the concept to the Boulder contingent, what would go on to be about a third of the studio, he had this graphic of the game laid out in layers, you know, like an onion.? At the core was the experience of rolling and moving; outside of that was the investment and building loop; PvP built around that, and then the other social and long-term retention systems.

Cutting across the onion from the core to the edge was Live Ops.? We knew right from the beginning that the game was going to shine as an events-driven game, but that the events had to build on everything else in the game.

So, like you do, we started building the game from the core out.? Rolling the dice and moving your token around the board may seem like a simple problem, but I’m not kidding when I say it took us months to figure out.? It’s times like this that I wish I still worked at Scopely – or at least had access to the project files.? There’s an archive that shows all the different approaches that were taken with just the camera.

Where is it by default?? How does it move?? Does it track the token?? If so, how?? What’s the field of view?? What’s important for the minimum zoom?? What’s important for the maximum zoom?? What’s going to be different on tablet vs. phone resolutions?

We didn’t take anything for granted.? Theory is great, but the rubber meets the road when you can get hands-on with the experience.? That means we mocked up all kinds of different cameras, different approaches to the boards, different rulesets, dozens of variants within the rulesets, we tested everything because that central experience of rolling the dice and moving the token is essential.

And the dice made it so much harder.? They had to feel like real dice; but, they had to stay on camera (as much as possible), and not collide with the token or the houses/hotels, and they had to roll quickly, but they had to feel natural.? The audio had to be just right – the visceral sound of dice on cardboard; the emotional memories required it.? But, again, we took nothing for granted.? We tried abstract dice, dice in a tray.? We tried prioritizing seeing the outcome; we experimented with how many frames we could shave between rolls if players were auto-rolling.? We tried UI reinforcements for outcomes.

Eventually, we learned that the dice didn’t have to do everything.? They had to feel organic; they had to resolve quickly, but they didn’t need to be on camera at all times, and it was okay if they poofed out of existence or clipped into things occasionally.? We could have spent more time covering even more edge and corner cases (literally – the physics are important), but ultimately, the perfect was the enemy of the good.? As long as the rhythm and feel of the dice was on target, it was good enough.

We learned very quickly, as you can try out on your own, simply rolling the dice and moving the token is not fun.? This wasn’t a surprise.? We always knew that rolling and moving, while the smallest gear and essential to get right, was not going to be enough.? It was necessary, but not sufficient.? It raises the key next question – if rolling and moving is what you do, what’s your goal?? Why are you doing it?

That leads nicely enough to the build/invest loop.? With this genre of games, there is a constant transfer of energy going on.? Dice rolls get turned into money; money gets turned into buildings; complete enough buildings and you get more dice rolls and money to start on a new map.?

We ran into a problem right away because the core driver of the game was “push button, get money”, but that’s not how the licensed game works.? Monopoly traditionally is a game about spending strategically (and getting lucky) and trading to get the best outcomes.? We didn’t want players spending money – too much choice, interrupts the core loop.? We didn’t want a high cognitive load experience; an earlier version of the game had really leaned into second-to-second decision making, and that wasn’t the right audience for this license.

It took a fair amount of time to sort out all the pieces of the build/invest loop.? At first, we tried to keep the buildings on the roll screen so that there was maximum impact on the build step – as you build things, you see the board change around you.? This was another area where we learned our initial assumptions were wrong; it was valuable to shift between roll mode and build mode, and we needed the screen real estate to really have the emotional impact at the moment of investment.? Players appreciated the change in pace and focus

We built the net worth system fairly early, since we understood that progression in and of itself was not going to be rewarding – what am I progressing towards?? Why does it make a difference?? But we also hit a fairly central conundrum: the game is all about money, but money isn’t actually all that valuable to players.

This was not a trivial problem.? We had the game running; we had rolling and moving; we had functional versions of the PvP events, we had Chance cards and a version of Community Chest working.? You could log in, get your rolls, spend your rolls, make a bunch of money, spend your money building buildings and completing maps, and it was not fun.

If, at some level, the board was like a slot machine, and rolling the dice was like pulling the lever, we had all the outcomes – duds, jackpots, big wins, small wins, fakeouts – but what we didn’t have was actual money.? Without real money, there are no stakes in a slot machine.? Even when you win the biggest jackpot, it’s just this really big, abstract number.

Not to get all Marxist here, but this is not an easy one to solve.? Money inherently has no utility – it has no use value.? Money is the ultimate embodiment of exchange – its utility is the ability to turn it into something you actually want or need.

There really wasn’t much you could do with money in Monopoly Go!? You could buy buildings; you could have it stolen.? That was about it.? Buying buildings got really repetitive – for one thing, we had placeholder assets, so you saw the same map over and over again.? We had the Net Worth leaderboard – but it didn’t have any tension to it.? We had a game that was all about money, and you could have all the money in the world and it felt pretty much the same as not having any money.

You always ended up back at zero money anyway, or as close to it as you could get.? Sitting on piles of cash just invites your friends to steal it from you – and while there is a potential value to that, it didn’t bring the fun.?

So, that’s a pretty big problem – a game about money where money doesn’t feel valuable.? The answer was just one layer of abstraction away – the real money wasn’t money, it was rolls.

But, again, this wasn’t obvious up front.? It came into focus the first time we really brought live ops online.? The first time we had a tournament where players could compete with each other to get the grand prize of more money and more rolls, suddenly all of the gears caught and the whole game had traction.

In retrospect, it was kind of obvious.? It had been staring at us from that onion diagram from the very beginning, but we’d had it backwards.? It wasn’t that the core game gave us an opportunity to run live ops; running live ops events made the core game meaningful.

Monopoly Go! is in many ways a glorified RNG – it’s a meditation on fortune at many levels.? But an RNG is only compelling if you care about the outcome.? The lottery has real money; casinos have real money; people are going to care because of what that money can buy them.? Monopoly Go! can’t give you real money – not without breaking all sorts of laws.

The carrot, it turns out, is hidden in one tiny button in the interface: the multiplier.

So, as we discovered, money isn’t actually all that valuable in Monopoly Go!? It’s basically just score, and it pretty much always goes up.? Even when you lose some, it’s pretty trivial in the grand scheme and you make it up again very quickly.? Yes, you can get strapped for money at the end of a board, but most of the time, it’s not actually money you’re chasing.? It’s rolls.

Rolls are the real capital in Monopoly Go! The more rolls you have, the more tokens you can collect, the farther you can get into whatever event is running, the higher up the tournament ladder you can finish.? Rolls are the fuel for the engine.? Rolls are what make the tokens go around.

And the multiplier is key.? If you try to roll 1000 rolls at 1X in Monopoly Go!, you will quit in frustration before you are finished.? In fact, I had a very senior designer friend complain to me at one point about how tedious the game became when you had a lot of rolls because he had never discovered the multiplier.

Rolling on 1X is only for when you want to maximize your Shut Downs.? If you’re not actively at war with someone, a higher multiplier gives you faster payoffs on every event, Chance card, Jail, etc.? Functionally, the RNG doesn’t care whether you’re spending rolls at 1 per push or 500 per push, but from a player experience, it makes all the difference.

When you’re rolling on 50X and you hit the Jail tile and you score the 6X reward, that’s 300 rolls – that’s like finishing in the top 10 in a tournament.? The higher the multiplier, the greater the impact of every game event – but also, the higher the cost.? This is the nautilus shell.

No matter how “rich” you get, you can always spend faster.? The highs are higher, but the duds are still zeroes, and they’re multiplied 20X or 1000X.? It feels good to have higher numbers; it feels good to rush through a board.? It feels good to jump to the top of a tournament.? It feels good to have a whole cascade of rewards.

It’s this ratio between playing slow and playing fast that drives the entire game.? You want more rolls so you can roll on a higher multiplier so you can get a better placement in the tournament so you can get more rolls.? It’s capital.? You can never have enough.

Massimo used to call it the rollercoaster.? You want the rush, that really big drop.? The bigger the multiplier, the faster the rolls.? The bigger the stash, the bigger the multiplier.

One of the things I always appreciated about Monopoly Go! is that while it is gambling-adjacent, it is very honest about what you get.? When you pay money, you get more rolls.? Whenever you have a lot of rolls and spend them fast, you get to feel what spending money is like.? There’s no bait and switch here.? There doesn’t need to be.? It’s fun to go fast.? Going faster costs more, ends sooner.? And that’s the multiplier at work.

So, it’s been interesting to see various people doing breakdowns on Monopoly Go!? There’s a lot the team got right; there’s a lot to point to and say “Look how well done this is!”.? As I said at the top, there’s no way to get to this level of success without everything going right, and getting a little lucky besides.? But, of all the reviews and breakdowns I’ve read, almost no one has focused on how important the tournaments and the multiplier are, much less how they tie together.? One person from Deconstructor of Fun “got it” on the multiplier.

So, if you listened to one of these “breakdowns” and built all the things that they call out, exactly the way they call them out, you still wouldn’t have a game.?

I know.?

I saw it.?

I played it.?

It wasn’t fun.

We found the fun,? sure.? We found more than a billion dollars worth.? But it wasn’t where people would lead you to believe.? So, why would you believe them?