You have probably heard by now, but rumor has it that Niantic is in talks with Scopely Inc. to sell their entire portfolio of games for around $3.5 billion US dollars! What an offer!
Scopely Inc. is part of a broader conglomerate called Savvy Games Group, which itself is owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. That’s a lot to take in, so let’s break it down before we explore Scopely’s games portfolio.
Scopely Inc’s financial background
Scopely Inc. is owned by Savvy Games Group, which is owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.
Scopely Inc. is one of a few companies which coexist within the Savvy Games Group. It was founded in 2011, and it has around 2000 employees across the globe. Scopely was bought by the Savvy Games Group for $4.9 billion US dollars in 2023, with the aim to accelerate Scopely’s growth and achievement of strategic objectives.
Savvy Games has been established in 2021 in Saudi Arabia, with a mission to “drive the long-term growth and development of esports and the broader games industry worldwide”. In other words, Savvy Games is the Saudi’s investment into video games, focused on purchasing prolific money making studios around the world.
Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia is among the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with total estimated assets of US$930 billion. It was created in 1971. and it has been investing in different assets over the past 50 years.
Scopely’s Games and Community Sentiment
Scopely owns some of the most successful mobile games in the world: MONOPOLY GO!, Stumble Guys, Marvel Strike Force, and Start Trek: Fleet Command, to name a few. Scopely’s games are almost always tied to a franchise, with almost no original titles. Different games studios own different games, and it’s hard to track which studio works on which game from Scopely’s portfolio.
On average, what we are seeing across their entire portfolio, and judging by the online commentary on their games is:
- an aggressive focus on monetization,
- lack of focus on quality of content,
- problematic customer support
We took a look at /r/MarvelStrikeForce, a subreddit focused on the Marvel Strike Force, and we were baffled by the community’s sentiment! Almost all of the top posts in the last year are about players quitting, wild monetization practices, and filled to the brim with anger towards Scopely!
A cursory look at /r/StarTrekFleetCommand ended up pretty much the same, with angered and disappointed players. Not good at all.
Luckily, the /r/Monopoly_GO subreddit was a bit… easier on the eyes and ears, with most posts focused on current in-game events, giveaways, and actual game content. We don’t know if this is due to the money-based nature of Monopoly, or if Scopely is doing a better job with MONOPOLY GO, but the sentiment is much better compared to communities for their other games.
All of this left us feeling quite confused. On one hand, we are aware that companies need to make money, and Niantic has been steadily increasing their monetization tactics over the past few years.
On the other hand, we are very concerned by multiple bug and low quality reports on both Marvel Strike Force and Star Trek: Fleet Command subreddits. We got the feeling that a lot of new features in both games needed more polish and time in the own before they were pushed to production.
Scopely’s technical background
Scopely is an American company, similar to Niantic, and we expected them to use a relatively similar tech stack. However, we didn’t find much overlap between the two companies!
- Scopely’s title often use Java, Go, Python and C++, with a ton of AWS services like EC2, ECR, RDS, S3, and IAM. There are no mentions of geospatial, augmented reality, or anything similar in their recent job postings.
- Niantic’s stack is more focused on Java and a broad range of Google services, which is expected given that Niantic is a Google spin-off!
We don’t know what to make of this, but we are definitely sure that Scopely will need some transition period and Niantic engineers to get up to speed with how Pokémon GO works. We are not sure if they have the manpower required to keep the game running well.
Parting words
With all of this being said, we must admit we don’t know what to think about this whole situation. Scopely is definitely a bigger company than Niantic, but their track record with role-playing games is not great.
Their success with MONOPOLY GO! aside, communities seem to be filled with frustration and anger, which is quite concerning!
We’ll keep you updated with the whole situation, but this is what we know so far.
