Mobile Publishing #1: Deconstructing Scopely's path to $1B
Welcome to the first episode of our Mobile Publisher Series. In each of the episode we sat down with the CEO of top mobile publisher and discussed how they approach publishing, what is their company’s strategy, how do they work with developers and how do they see the future of publishing on mobile.
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Javier Ferreira, Scopely’s Co-CEO
Scopely
The vision for the company has been, and continues to be, to build the definitive free-to-play mobile games company in the west.
To do that, we focus on three core components, building: (1) a studio ecosystem that can deliver genre-leading long-term products, (2) our Scopely tech platform that empowers the best personalization and monetization of those long-term product experiences in a durable and sophisticated way, and (3) a strong company ‘operating system’, which to us means iterating on the best processes, caliber of talent, culture and internal experience that will allow us to operate our studio ecosystem (1) and tech platform (2) at scale.
In short, we are focused on word-class: talent + tech to create and deliver immersive, personalized game experiences.
Product Strategy
We have a data-driven content and audience strategy that drives our thinking about the kind of games we want to make.
We are not a distributor of third-party content. We are not a publisher of third-party content. We are a games company that is building what we think is a highly-sophisticated content game slate that our Scopely tech platform can support and operate across many genres.
Technology
The Scopely tech platform is one of our core strategic pillars. In addition to our product know-how, we need the technology and tools to operate the experiences.
Our Scopely tech platform is focused on three buckets: 1) game engines, 2) game services (tournaments, leaderboards, etc.) to allow our franchise game teams to hyper-focus on the player experience, and 3) publishing tech (data, BI, UA, marketing, segmentation, machine learning, etc.) that can attract players on a one-to-one basis.
Our tech platform allows us to build games efficiently and deliver a “directed-by-consumer” experience, where each user is empowered to build the type of experience they want to play in our games.
Teams
Driven by our content strategy, we look for teams that can best specialize and execute our vision. Eliminating the external vs. internal studio or developer concept, we instead think about how we can assemble the best franchise game team to deliver market-leading outcomes.
We’re focused on building franchise teams with incredible talent density where we eliminate the traditional boundaries between developer and publisher and operate as a single team on a shared goal: deliver amazing experiences to players.
We are conscious of the things we know how to do well, and are open to finding the right partners to highlight our skill sets -- so our franchise game teams can consist of both Scopely employees and strategic partners working together as a single unit. These teams have the operational and creative autonomy required for great game making, are hyper-focused on building a great product, and while each studio has a unique relationship to Scopely, all have the goal of operating games players love.
Mindset to Launch
Patience, KPIs over financials and World-class teams. In most cases, there are great [peak] moments and not-so-great valleys during development, but ultimately, if the team strong and the product is good, it’s just a matter of time until you can find those right key performance indicators (KPIs) to drive long-lasting experiences. We are dedicated to investing in products and teams for the long-term.
Start Trek Fleet Command in an example of Scopely’s methodical approach. The focus is on delivering the best possible game, even if it took a bit longer.
Original or beloved IP?
Scopely is an audience-driven company not an IP-driven company. What we aim to solve at a product strategy level is to make durable game experiences for large, evergreen, engaged audiences.
In conclusion
It’s easy to make a game. 100+ games launch everyday. It’s not so easy to make a successful, large-scale, long-lasting game. Very few are made on a yearly basis. Scopely is dedicated to creating and sustaining long-term game experiences.
We don’t follow the traditional ideas that many people have around mobile games and we appreciate the opportunity to explain our point of view.
