With the rumors of Niantic in discussions with Scopely about acquisition, Pokémon Go players are worried about the mobile game’s future, but why is that? Scopely has a history of aggressive monetization methods.
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Who is Scopely?
Scopely is a multinational company focused on mobile gaming founded in 2011, and has since bought other game studios such as FoxNext Games Los Angeles, the PierPlay studio, and the Game Show Network’s gaming division before it was bought by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund Savvy Games Group.
As of February 2025, Scopely has integrated eight game studios into the company with offices in the United States, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Asia. The games they develop are usually tied to a famous IP such as Marvel, Star Trek, and Looney Toons, or are mobile versions of tabletop games like Monopoly, Yahtzee, and Scrabble.
Scopely’s game portfolio
Scopely currently has 12 mobile games published. They started with the Buddies franchise—Dice with Buddies, Jewels with Buddies, and Bubble Galaxy with Buddies—following a classic mobile game premise.
Their first collaboration with a major IP was with Hasbro to launch an officially licensed Yahtzee mobile game. They have never stopped since then, releasing games such as The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, Wheel of Fortune: Free Play, Star Trek Fleet Command, Looney Tunes World of Mayhem, Monopoly Go!, and Marvel Strike Force.
Their games have been extremely successful, reaching the top-five games six times consecutively in the iOS App Store by 2016. These IP mobile games have taken Scopely to a company value of $5.4 billion as of 2021. They also received the Webby Award for People’s Voice in the sports games category for WWE Champions.
Scopely’s reputation
Many players have claimed in reviews and forums from across all Scopely’s games how over the years, the company’s updates have transformed games into a “money trap,” making them “pay-to-win” and enticing players to spend a lot of money in order to progress in a reasonable time.
In Marvel Strike Force, for example, a recent review from a player who claims to have played the game for four years complains about how the game gets extremely difficult unless you buy the meta team, and they have to spend much more than before to have fun. If you don’t have to unlock characters behind a paywall, then the amount of ads can also take away from the experience, as one recent reviewer said about Scrabble GO: Classic Word Game.
What will Pokémon Go’s monetization be like under Scopely?
It’s impossible to say for certain how the monetization in Go would change if Scopely buys Niantic, but it would make no sense for it to not follow the same model of other games in Scopely’s portfolio, which means the company will likely push players to spend more money through gameplay.
It’s highly unlikely that Pokémon Go would have ads, however. The current monetization in Go revolves around purchases for things like Poké Balls, incense, incubators, lucky eggs for more XP, and storage upgrades, as well as paid events. Some Reddit users have already posted montages of possible monetization practice Scopely could adopt in Go regarding Shiny Pokémon.
On the other hand, some players hope Scopely could reimplement no daily limit for Remote Raid Passes as a new monetization method since those players stopped spending as much after the price doubled and they were limited to only five a day.
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