{"id":2052897,"date":"2025-09-26T22:30:46","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T22:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2052897"},"modified":"2025-09-26T22:30:46","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T22:30:46","slug":"why-mobile-gaming-has-seen-such-explosive-growth-in-a-decade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/why-mobile-gaming-has-seen-such-explosive-growth-in-a-decade\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Mobile Gaming Has Seen Such Explosive Growth in a Decade"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

\n\tThe numbers speak for themselves: 5 billion hours of gameplay in 12 months. That\u2019s the going rate of business activity at Scopely<\/a>, the mobile gaming giant behind such popular titles as \u201cMonopoly Go!\u201d and \u201cPok\u00e9mon Go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTim O\u2019Brien, chief revenue officer of Scopely, traced the arc of mobile gaming\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe dawn of the iPhone in 2007 was really Year One for mobile gaming, although titles did exist before then, O\u2019Brien told Jennifer Maas, Variety<\/em>\u2018s senior business writer for TV and gaming.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThings really took off when [Steve] 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,\u201d O\u2019Brien recalled. \u201cWhat 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 \u2014 two or three, four-person shops were getting downloaded like hundreds of thousands of times.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBy 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\u2019Brien said.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe stats are that 15% of people will tell you they\u2019re gamer, but 50% of people globally actually play mobile games. It\u2019s a huge stat. But mobile gaming has transformed, I think, the entertainment industry. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2014, shortly after O\u2019Brien 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. \u201cWe did it in the first 30 days,\u201d O\u2019Brien said. \u201cWe immediately had the largest Yahtzee product they\u2019d ever produced at Hasbro.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tScopely was recognized this month<\/a> by Variety<\/em> as a Billion Dollar Brand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source variety.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The numbers speak for themselves: 5 billion hours of gameplay in 12 months. That\u2019s the going rate of business activity at Scopely, the mobile gaming giant behind such popular titles as \u201cMonopoly Go!\u201d and \u201cPok\u00e9mon Go.\u201d Tim O\u2019Brien, chief revenue officer of Scopely, traced the arc of mobile gaming\u2019s rise as an economic force as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2052898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[381469,381470,352260,380692],"class_list":["post-2052897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-scopely","tag-scopely-ent-tech","tag-tim-obrien","tag-variety-entertainment-and-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Why-Mobile-Gaming-Has-Seen-Such-Explosive-Growth-in-a.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2052897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2052897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2052897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2052898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2052897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2052897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2052897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}