Deconstructing Monopoly GO! — will it be a $100M hit ?

Images from App Store page of Monopoly GO!

Key Takeaways (150 word summary):

1. Monopoly GO! is a social casino game with a dice-rolling core with build, attack/steal mechanisms. Gameplay’s strength is simplicity and high production value art.
2. The barriers to entry into social casino market are: (1) Having a clear edge in UA, (2) delivering enhanced social entertainment experience. This is achievable only when a sizeable amount of the player’s circle is in the game. (3) Delivering novel casino style core-loops.
3. Monopoly IP has found a strong game design fit, and above-average market & business fit for this genre. It’s strength is the brand’s awareness and to succeed they have to: (1) Get their target audience in one go, and thus creating entertaining social gameplay within the game, (2) VIP management of core casino players.
4. Game design improvement includes: (1) Long-term goal setting, (2) Predominant revenge loops, (3) Clear live events expectations, and (4) Tighter casino experience in core loop

Monopoly. The ultimate board game. With friends and family, this captivating game has brought hearty laughter, fierce rivalries, and pure joy over a board and an evening. Monopoly has been selling more than 275 million copies in over 114 countries in its 88 long years of existence¹. Hasbro (Monopoly’s IP owner) recorded its highest-ever board game sales in 2020, following the pandemic lockdown. Wanting to ride on this new wave of attention to the Monopoly IP, Hasbro & Scopely (creators of Marvel Strike Force) recently released a new mobile game called Monopoly GO! This article deconstructs this game to understand its strengths and weaknesses.

This deconstruction is structured into 7 parts, you can skip to any of these sections by clicking their links below:

1. Overview of Monopoly GO!
2. Overview of the social casino mobile games market
3. Player archetypes who enjoy social casino games
4. Monopoly GO!’s game mechanics
5. “Slapping an IP” on a successful format: Will it work? Has it worked before for Monopoly?
6. Monopoly GO!’s unique advantage and its condition for becoming a hit
7. Improving Monopoly GO!

Part — 1: Overview of Monopoly GO!

Monopoly GO! is a social casino game with a dice-rolling core game with build & attack/steal features blended into the core game. This experience is strongly supported by social network (FB) integration, leaderboards, limited-time live events, and rewarding collection mechanisms

At first glance, it is confusing. Monopoly is social casino now?

On its App Store/Play Store page, Monopoly GO! clearly sells its nostalgic board game-esque features through its video banner²: it’s classic board, roll the dice, expand your empire, charge rent, bankrupt friends, and win. All they say is true. However, it is packaged in a different format.

Here is the summary (discussed in detail in Part-4):

• Dice rolling: You have the classic monopoly board and limited dice rolling turns. However, unlike the board game, you need not buy/own cards, and there is no charging rent from your friends. You get a certain amount of money based on the tile you land on. Some tiles are small wins, and a few are MEGA wins. Between these two types of wins, there are “chance-based” wins on specific tiles. There is no planning/thinking involved; it becomes a luck-based core game.
• Attacking/Stealing: When you land on a mega win tile, you either get the option to attack a random opponent/friend (big win), or you get the option to steal loot from a random opponent (biggest win).
• Building: With the money, you can build structures in cities. This is a straightforward, one-click, instant building experience. The building gives you progression points, and accumulating progression points gives you new cities (100 new themes) and more money when rolling the dice next time.
• Its biggest strength in core gameplay is its simplicity and high-quality art. (Product’s strength to be discussed in Part — 6)

Part — 2: Overview of the social casino mobile games market

The casino category in the mobile games market is the 4th largest category in in-app purchases (IAP), accounting for 10% of all IAP spending worldwide while making only 3% of all downloads³. Interestingly, it is the #1 category in the United States, accounting for 19% of all IAP spends and 4% of all downloads³.

Category statistics from Data AI, market report 2023

Casino games have one of the highest revenue per download (RPD) but still struggle to make it to the top charts. Then came Coin Master, which innovated the casino format from games staying true to casino machines to including rewarding meta-games like building & social battling. Combined with influencer marketing & exceptional live services, Coin Master has raked in more than $3 billion in lifetime revenue⁴. Moreover, its success is attributed to social elements in the game.

Coin Master dominated the social casino market for the past 4 years, and there were attempts to adopt this format and publish a challenger game, but none could challenge Coin Master:

• Piggy GO, $17 Mn revenue in 2021 and $9.9 Mn in 2022⁵
• Pet Master, $17.8 Mn revenue in 2021 and $7.5 Mn in 2022⁵ (same publisher as Coin Master’s)
• Dice dreams, $32 Mn revenue in 2021 and $54.7 Mn in 2022⁵

Don’t get me wrong; Dice Dreams is a definite hit game, but when you compare it to Coin Master, with $928 Mn in 2021, and $845 Mn in 2022⁵, it does not appear as a challenger.

What are the barriers to entry?
The broader social casino market is estimated to be around $7.2 Billion in size and is projected to grow at a rate of 6.2%⁶. The barrier to entry into this market is not the cost it takes to build the format (Piggy GO did it), not network effects, and not standalone artistic expertise (Dice Dreams has incredible art), but a combination of the below three factors:

1. Having a clear edge in user acquisition (UA) when compared to the pack
2. Delivering a similar/better social entertainment experience would mean having your friends who play such games play the same game with you.
3. Delivering an increased core game entertainment experience — which coin master has perfected over these years & tough to beat.

Does Monopoly GO! have what it takes? More on Part-6.

Part — 3: Player archetypes who enjoy social casino games

There are three types of players who enjoy social casino games:

1. Social entertainment seeker
2. Excitement seeker
3. Collector & Explorer

1. Social Entertainment seeker:

• This kind of player thrives on connecting and interacting with other players in the game. They enjoy games that have collaboration, competition, and communication.
• In social casino games, they enjoy attacking the people who attacked them and the to-and-fro battle of attacks between their friends’ circle.
• This is the broadest audience among the three archetypes, and they leave the game if they cannot interact with other players engagingly.

2. Excitement seeker:

• This kind of player enjoys and prefers exciting gameplay and the dopamine hits that come with that. The ups and downs and the unpredictability of situations & rewards make the game exciting for them.
• A typical casino player is an excitement seeker, with some players playing it for relaxation.
• This audience attributes to one of the highest revenue per download in mobile game categories. They leave the game if the entertainment is not fast-paced or too monotonous.

3. Collector & Explorer:

• This kind of player is drawn to expansive worlds, new content, and various collectibles. They also value owning more than others. Imagine Ash from Pokemon; he is the person that fits this criterion.
• They play the game for its novelty and progression toward collecting rare items. They trade and collaborate with others to achieve these goals if given options.

Part — 4: Monopoly GO!’s game mechanics

Core loop:
The core loop of this game has three parts:

1. Starting with a game piece on a monopoly board, you roll two six-faced dice. This is similar to the classic Monopoly board game. Roles are the hard currency of the game. 5 roles are given every 1 hour, which is a pretty long time to recharge this energy mechanism (40 roll capacity, 10-hour recharge time).
2. Based on where you land, you’re given a reward (usually monopoly money). Apart from monopoly money, you’re also given certain big wins — Shutdown (attacking other people’s bases) or Bank Heist (stealing from others). There’s also a defensive reward — “Shields”, which blocks other people’s attack on your base. There are negative rewards too that take money from you!
3. You can then sink all the monopoly money earned to build buildings in a city. Each building has 5–6 upgrades (artistic upgrades), and you can progress to a new city when you complete all the upgrades in your current city. There’s a huge reward (of rolls & money) when you complete all the upgrades in a city.

Notes in the core loop:

1. In the core loop, you play alone. No friends can participate in this. Even though some tiles have “rent” and “chance reward” written in them, they are just a means to give you monopoly money under a different title.
2. Being attacked when you don’t have a shield can affect your building upgrade progress. This is where there develops a thirst to take “revenge.” Similarly, being bank-heisted may reduce your monopoly money, so spend it before leaving the game!
3. Variable rewards are the name of the game. The highs and lows are immense.

Social gameplay — Shutdown (Attack) & Bank Heist (steal):

One of the results of rolling the dice is landing on a “railroad” tile; a railroad tile can give you the option to Shutdown (Attack another player’s city) or Bank Heist (Steal another player’s money)

Shutdown:

When you get the Shutdown option, you are shown a random opponent’s city and an option to switch the opponent. The attacking move is a simple one-click. The results are of two types:

1. If the opponent has a shield (that can block an attack), you get lesser rewards
2. If the opponent does not have a shield, you get 2–3x the rewards in a block.

It’s variable rewards-ception — variable rewards inside a variable reward. For players on the receiving side, blocked shutdowns do no damage, while shutdowns cause their buildings to go below half a level.

When switching an opponent, you can choose someone to “revenge,” players who have attacked your base earlier, or you can choose a friend that you’ve made in-game or connected via Facebook. You can narrow down your wrath to one of your friends and exhaust their shields if you need! It creates a “revenge” based social interaction that’s a powerful motivator to roll more.

Bank Heist:

When you get the Bank Heist option, you’re shown a random opponent with a given amount of money shown. There are 12 doors, and behind each door is one among 3 symbols. Each symbol correlated to either a small, medium, or big heist. When you open the doors, the first symbol to amount up to 3 in number becomes your reward. It’s a fairly simple mechanic that once again leverages variable rewards and feeling close to variable rewards as a way to drive excitement.

There are no switching options in bank heist.

Buildings & Progression:

Each building has 5–6 levels of upgrades, and each city has 5 buildings. A progression point is awarded for each upgrade, and the progression levels unlock higher and higher levels of consumable rewards when you roll. This progression level is also used to compare the status between friends in the leaderboard; a higher progression level player is placed in a higher place. When you complete a city, you move to the next one on the map. The upgrades become costlier the more you progress. New city = New themes! Keeps the rolling fresh and exciting

One design choice to note: Consumable rewards scale considerably lesser than the cost of upgrades

Meta game: Sticker collection in albums

From completing daily and weekly goals, players can get “sticker packs,” which can give substantial one-time consumable rewards (Rolls and money) when completed in an album. It also doubles as a collaboration feature where players can trade duplicate stickers among friends to complete their collection. However, their collection completion rate is still controlled by a rare, non-tradable “gold sticker.”

Strong growth loop:

Along with banners to monetize heavily constrained rolls, Monopoly GO! has also given an additional “out” for players in the form of inviting friends to play. They offer:

1. Huge one-time consumable reward for inviting friends. You can share a link to invite. You can also bring in your Facebook friends through login.
2. Regular consumable rewards called “community chest,” which recharges whenever you land on a tile and break once it fills to reward not only you but also your friends. This reward becomes a “gift” from you to your friends.

Other system mechanics:

Session style: 1 meal and 1 snack; 1 meal session rewards you with 2x-3x the base amount of rolls from live events and pushes you to roll more; 1 snack does the opposite and this session puts a lot of pressure on spending.
Other retention mechanisms: progression rewards, daily free gift, daily login rewards, daily and weekly goals (Quick win)
Monetization mechanisms: Starter packs, Live event packs, Endless-ladder monetization mechanism
Live services: Daily new event, 3–4 day themed event (sometimes with a mini-game), random hourly events & bonuses (cash bonus, no penalty bonus etc)
Engagement mechanics: Global/Local/Friends Leaderboards, Event leaderboards, Hourly bonuses, revenge & steal notifications

The standout feature in other mechanics: Endless-ladder monetization

Endless-ladder monetization is when you’re given a free gift to begin with, and you’re shown 3 more gifts in a ladder — the first one is paid, but the remaining 2 are mentioned as “FREE”, this creates a bias in the player’s mind to “not lose the free gifts,” and the value of the gifts keep on increasing to push the pressure to buy higher and higher.

A summary of the entertainment value of Monopoly GO:

• Thrill: The roller coaster ride of rewards when rolling the dice
• Satisfaction of collecting cards & exploring places
• Competition: Taking revenge against people who destroyed you, progressing faster than your friends & stopping them
• Collaboration: Winning together with friends through sharing & participating

Part — 5: Slapping an IP on a successful format: will it work? Has it worked before for Monopoly?

To clarify, Monopoly GO! did not “slap their IP”; they did a thoughtful reconstruction of Coin Master (and certain dice dream mechanics) that naturally matched Monopoly’s design themes. But it is important to ask whether “slapping their IP” on a hit format works in an already crowded mobile market.

We are going to evaluate this game & IP fit in terms of three main categories (adopted from Newzoo’s 2022 report⁸):

1. Market fit: Is the IP relevant for the target audience? (+ 3 more parameters)
2. Game design fit: Does the theme of the IP fit its usage in the game?
3. Business fit: Does the IP lend itself to marketing, monetization, and other business advantages?

Market fit⁸:

1. IP Scale: Is the IP well-known to your game’s target audience?
2. IP relevance: Does the IP allow players to engage more deeply with your game?
3. Demographic to genre fit: Does the IP’s demographic player profile share a strong match with the genre?
4. Competition: Are you creating something original? Is there a lot of competition for your product?

Game design fit⁸:

1. Game mechanics fit: Can the IP’s mechanics translate to game mechanics? How engaging is it?
2. Theme fit: Does the IP’s world provide an immersive experience to the players in the game?
3. Tone fit: Does the game match with IP’s art styles, music, and adaptations?

Business fit⁸:

1. Monetization: Does the IP lend itself to strong monetization opportunities?
2. Marketing and distribution: Can the IP’s existing channels help you promote your game? Does the IP have a brand that creates a higher user preference for your game?
3. Retention/LiveOps: Are there opportunities that the IP provides to make the game a place to engage over the long term?

Here’s the evaluation & reasoning (considering the target demographic to be social entertainment seekers):

Monopoly entering the casino category is not new; they have found mini-hits over the years in casino games — Bingo Bash & Monopoly Slots. Here’s the list of games with Monopoly IP:

Here’s an insight to note — Monopoly IP has done quite well in the casino category, and average & big spenders have IP affinity far more than other players [8]. This would mean Monopoly GO! can expect to monetize really well with excitement seekers & casino fans.

A chart from Newzoo report depicting IP influencing motivation to download a game for average and big spenders:

Part — 6: Monopoly GO!’s unique advantage and its condition for becoming a hit

At the end of part — 2, we discussed three barriers to entry for the social casino market: (1) Clear edge in UA, (2) Tough to create a similar social experience, and (3) increased entertainment experience through game mechanics.

Monopoly GO!’s unique strength is (1), and the condition to become a hit is (2); let’s see both of these in detail.

Monopoly GO!’s unique advantage: Brand driven edge in UA + a strong growth loop design

When it comes to UA in social casino games, a successful strategy for Coin Master has been influencer-based ads with a creative twist. Popular influencers like Khloe Kardashian, Cardi B, and Jennifer Lopez have done ads that showcased competitive social gameplay along with slot-based mechanics.

Similarly, another player in the genre, Dice Dreams got creative with their social battle positioning but without top-of-the-rank influencers.
https://video.adsoftheworld.com/gnt1tqw1mr2outx2v53zqf7gt125.mp4

Apart from this, Dice Dreams experimented with a lot of UA processes until their metrics improved, (Read more about this, from Deconstructor of Fun)

Due to Monopoly’s brand awareness in key social casino markets, they have an edge in UA and are expected to have a lower CPI due to this. In addition to this, the Monopoly GO! team is definitely getting creative with their ads. One such ad (a variant of a popular shiba inu meme):

Combined with this UA edge, they have got strong growth loops in-game in the form of:

1. Rewarded invites (as mentioned in Part-4)
2. Community chests, the gameplay rewards become more with friends (as mentioned in part-4)

and these loops are pushed as a banner every time a player runs out of rolls. The player sees two pain banners first and then perceives the reward through invites as a deal with incredible value.

Their condition for success:

Monopoly GO!’s entertainment experience fully is multi-fold and fully unlocks only when you have enough friends in your network who’re playing Monopoly GO! as you. The excitement and the drive to roll are simply not there if you are not in a network that plays with you.

This shows up in the stats too! Let’s look at coin master’s evolution from a medium RPD game to a high RPD game.

There are two graphs here, the first one is Coin Master’s download graph⁹and the second one is its 30-day revenue per download (RPD)⁹. Let’s look at the RPD graph first. You can clearly see there are two levels of RPD. One significantly higher than the other

Coin Master Download Stats (From Game Refinery Free edition)

Coin Master transitioning to a high RPD game

One major factor contributing to this is that you retain more and more VIP spenders as your downloads explode and RPD goes up when your downloads get lower, but the second factor is interesting — the social entertainment that comes through attacking and getting attacked by a bunch of friends truly upgrades when more of your friends are present in Coin master. And suddenly, there’s added pressure on getting slot spins.

You can see a similar pattern evolving right now with dice dreams, with their UA efforts in mid-late 2022 making their RPDs better.

Dice Dreams all-time download stats (From Game Refinery Free edition)

If Monopoly GO! is going to win, they have got to align their UA efforts to attract big spenders in social entertainment seekers and give them a better entertainment experience by having most of their friends in the in-game network. A geography-focused big bang of sorts.

Combined with VIP spender management for excitement seekers (casino enjoyers), this will dictate Monopoly GO!’s ability to become a hit.

Is Monopoly GO! perfect otherwise? No — there are areas for improvement. This is what we are going to see next.

Part — 7 Improving Monopoly GO!

There are 4 main improvements:

1. Long-term goal setting in early to mid-level gameplay
2. Making revenge predominant
3. Setting expectations for live events
4. A tighter rolling experience

1. Long-term goal setting:

In early levels (think Day 1 — Day 5), there are simply no goals to look forward to. There’s no strong answer to:

• Why should I upgrade my buildings to go to a new map?
• Why should I buy more rolls & multiply my bets to make more monopoly money?
  Progression rewards and board completion rewards only partly answer this question, and sticker albums answer this question for later levels.

If you look at coin master, it gives a clear direction in the early levels. Go to Village 4, unlock new social interaction content (Teams), and Unlock reward bonuses (Pets). A carrot of this kind — let it be new content or bonuses, is missing in Monopoly GO!

2. Making revenge predominant:

When attacking, players often miss seeing the option for “revenge” or “Attack friends”, as the option to do this blends with the design and does not stand out. Revenge and attacking friends are vital to encouraging social engagement, they should be the main CTA of the attack page. Here’s a comparison with Coin Master on how they handle revenge CTAs.

3. Setting expectations for live events:

Even though very rewarding, live events have varied schedules. Some last for 1 hour, some for a day, and some for 3–4 days. Some are leaderboards, while some are goalposts. Random live events are good for creating a sense of uncertainty and excitement around their availability but in its current version, it is bordering on an unstructured distraction. The experience would be so much more enjoyable if they can structure it into 1 main event, 1 secondary event, and 1 random event in their respective slots.

4. Tighter rolling experience:

This improvement is meant for casino-loving players (Excitement seekers).

With exceptional art and monopoly concepts, the developers have stayed true to their monopoly roots. It is definitely fun to roll, but when you compare it with slot spinning, the ups and downs, and the roller coaster ride of the experience is a bit on the lesser side for Monopoly GO. This can be attributed to the reason that in slot spinning — a near-victory loss gives the feeling of “being so close to winning”, but in a board game setting, a near-victory loss is definitely a loss, because you cannot roll “1” with two dices, and the user exactly knows the odds of landing on a railroad tile.

Apart from this, the feedback and the reset is 2x quicker in slot spinning. For example, a Coin Master spin with rewards takes 1.8–2 seconds to happen, while in Monopoly GO, the same experience happens in 4–5 seconds. This may not seem like a lot of difference, but this is the difference between running out of spins in one go vs getting bored and quitting the app when you account for this difference for more than 90 seconds. A loss feels so much more comfortable in coin master slot spinning.

That’s the conclusion.

My bet is on Monopoly GO! breaking the $100 Mn milestone. Excited to see how this will unfold.

Thank you for reading!

If you have read this far, I would love to talk to you. I am exploring more about the industry and would love to discuss more about gaming, business, and markets. Let’s connect? Linkedin, Twitter

Special mentions to:

1. How Coin Master Disrupted Social Casino and Pocketed $100M, By Deconstructor of Fun, for perspectives on Coin Master’s mechanics
2. Deconstructing Coin Master in 2021, by defunctgamer, for perspectives on Coin Master’s mechanics
3. Coin Master Advertising Dissection: How It Acquired 200 Million Users, for perspectives on UA

References:

1. CNN, Monopoly: At 80, it just keeps GO-ing, https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/19/living/feat-monopoly-80th-anniversary/index.html
2. Monopoly GO! page on App Store, https://apps.apple.com/ph/app/monopoly-go/id1621328561?platform=iphone
3. Data AI, state of mobile gaming report 2023, https://www.data.ai/en/go/state-of-mobile-gaming-2023
4. Coin master lifetime revenue, https://mobilemarketingreads.com/coin-master-revenue-and-usage-statistics-2022/
5. Revenue data points from Data.ai
6. Research & Markets, Global Social Casino Games Market, https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/5574817/global-social-casino-games-market-by-type
7. Core loop — dice, steal images from Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik
8. Newzoo IP Based Mobile games report, https://resources.newzoo.com/hubfs/Reports/Mobile/2022_Newzoo_IP-Based_Mobile_Games_Report_Free_FINAL.pdf
9. Coin Master downloads, Game Refinery, Only iOS and iPad downloads shown in the graph