Year 2002. Smartphones as we know them are still an entelechy in the minds of a few visionaries. It is even more unlikely to imagine that in just a few years people will spend hours and hours playing fruit matching or slingshotting birds on a black, rectangular screen that fits in the palm of their hand. And 22 years ago video games were those on the console. Only some make their way and reach your pocket, like Tetris or Snake, which makes the keys of the old Nokia 3310 smoke. But even in such a bygone era, some were already clear that this was one of the keys to the sector’s great growth. And they decide to bet everything on that hunch. It is precisely that year, 2022, when Javier Ferreira (Madrid, 1976) begins his career in the development of mobile games.
We return to the present. Ferreira shares the position of chief executive of Scopely with Walter Driver, one of the founders of this company. Scopely, created in California in 2011 as a start-up The startup, hungry for all the funding it could get from venture capital funds, has ended up becoming one of the largest multinationals in the mobile gaming sector. Its flagship product is Monopoly Go, the mobile version of the popular game about capitalism launched in 2023. With this game alone, Scopely generates revenues of 300 million dollars a month, thanks to the more than 20 million users it has every day. In total, the company invoices more than 4 billion dollars annually, and since it started it has grown by double digits in almost every year. Last year, the Savvy Games group —owned by the sovereign wealth fund FIP of Saudi Arabia, which is entering different sectors in an attempt to diversify its investments— bought Scopely for 4.9 billion dollars, in what was then the sixth largest sale operation in the mobile gaming sector.
The transformation of the world of mobile gaming applications in Ferreira’s 22-year career has been enormous. “Sometimes the importance that this industry has taken on is not understood, perhaps due to a generational issue, but it is central: we all play, and it is the entertainment industry that has the most revenue and users in the world,” he explains at the Scopely offices. in Barcelona, which Ferreira visited at the end of April with other members of his team. The sector is not going through its best moment, like all technology companies, and large companies have carried out personnel cuts, but it is still gigantic: the analysis firm Newzoo estimates that in 2023 global turnover was 184,000 million dollars —in Spain, according to the Spanish Video Game Association, turnover was 2,012 million euros in 2022—.
Although Spain represents a relatively small part of global turnover, it is a pole of attraction for video game companies, as witnessed by the various headquarters of video game multinationals that have settled in Spain. Scopely arrived in Barcelona in 2017 and in 2020 it landed in Seville. Of Scopely’s more than 2,300 employees, about 800 are in the Catalan capital and about 200 in Seville. “We are the first video game company in Spain by number of employees, but we also have our global technological headquarters in Barcelona, with the development of the Playgami platform and many of our products are developed from here,” says Ferreira, who believes that in Spain There is great potential for talent, but there is a lack of its own business fabric.
New partner
The sale to the Saudi group, Ferreira explains, served to give a return to the shareholders who had invested in Scopely, and also to the workers who had been hired with stock options (stock options that start-ups They usually give to workers who want to incorporate into the team, and which they convert into money at the time of sale). “We also wanted a partner like Savvy, who would allow us to be very ambitious with a long-term vision. No one has a dominant share in our industry, and this partner can provide us with financial support to grow,” explains Ferreira, who rules out that an IPO would have been a better alternative. Some of the companies with which Scopely competes did choose to go public, such as Electronic Arts, which is listed on Nasdaq, or the giant Activision Blizzard King, which later ceased trading when it was acquired by Microsoft in an operation that was closed. last year for 69 billion dollars. Other rivals are part of large technology groups, such as the American Riot Games, owned by the Chinese Tencent.
Monopoly Go represents a good part of Scopely’s income, but Ferreira boasts that its range of products is wide, with games such as Stumble Guys, Marvel Strike Force, Scrabble Go, Star Trek Fleet Command or Yahtzee With Buddies, the latter being a game which was launched in 2011 and has been growing until reaching its revenue record two years ago. “There are businesses that are still there 15 years after launching them. You can only achieve this if you are able to improve the product every month, investing in development and marketing. We have done it with Yahtzee and we are doing it with Monopoly Go,” explains Ferreira, who says that, currently, there are six more games in development.
“Traditional video game companies didn’t understand this very well,” he says, referring to the traditional business model of developing a game, publishing it and not continuing to make money. The model for mobile games is different: games are usually free at the time of download, but are monetized as they are played, or if the user wants to access more parts or elements of the game. “It’s a very established business model because it’s very good for the user, since they can try and discover what game they like, without entry barriers, and then they can improve by investing time and money. And it’s a very good model for companies, because it allows for continued income over time,” he explains, although he admits that the difficult part is analyzing the data well to design a game that will last in the long term.
Ferreira, who before landing at Scopely in 2014 had developed his career in the games sector at Disney, at Jamdat Mobile and at Electronic Arts, remembers when he played Metal Gear or the first of the Legends saga on his Msx 2 as a child. of Zelda. Now he continues playing, especially on his mobile, and with his son on Fortnite. He still has years left in his career, and judging by how the sector may transform with virtual reality, what sounds new now may end up seeming as old as the snake on the Nokia, so fashionable 20 years ago.
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