Scopely’s Massimo Maietti revealed the Monopoly Go team’s “biggest and most embarrassing mistake” at GDC yesterday – and said that he is still not fully happy with the $2bn game.
Speaking during a ‘game designer’s notebook’ session, the Scopely product VP and Monopoly Go GM said that when he joined Scopely in 2016, his dev team spent three years building a first attempt at Monopoly Go, a Clash Royale-style take on real-time PvP (which we’ve previously discussed with Maietti).
“We launched it and players really did not like it – it was the wrong game,” he said. It was swiftly cancelled, but in 2019 the same group of developers started work on another edition of Monopoly Go – this time with the knowledge of what went wrong last time.
Maietti said it was important to “keep the wound open” – or rather, let his team own that first failure, take responsibility for it and analyse what went wrong with Monopoly Go V1.
“You could explain the failure away by saying it was the market’s fault, or saying that 13 other Monopoly games launched and none of them were really successful…but we were the ones that made all the mistakes. We thought that the audience was there and the players were there, and the team was remarkably intellectually honest.”
“We observed the wound, didn’t try to close it too soon, and allowed ourselves to take all the steps to understanding of our mistakes.”
This is how Maietti and his team came to understand their “biggest and most embarrassing mistake”: it was using the Monopoly IP to make the game the team wanted to make, rather than the game that best fit the IP. Before, the team was “leveraging, utilising and exploiting” the Monopoly brand, he said.
As the team headed in the Coin Master-inspired direction we see today, Scopely also thought more deeply about why Monopoly has such broad appeal. It’s the tension between the idea of the socialist communist family and market capitalism.
“In Monopoly these two things come together – you get to bankrupt your dad, or your mother makes you pay rent,” said Maietti. “All of a sudden your relationships have a dollar sign on them.”
Maietti were confident that once the game had spread among the player base’s social graph, it would be really sticky. Which then led to the team realising that it should remove as much skill from the game as possible, to allow everyone to play.
“Progression in Monopoly Go needs to be strong enough to carry you on a journey, but at the same time it needs to include everybody, as your brother might install the game after you, or your mother might play much more than you,” said Maietti.
Scopely’s designers also worked hard on making the game feel like a social environment, Maietti said, and it was important for players to identify characteristics in other people’s play patterns easily, to give those interactions weight and character.
“If you can say things like ‘like this person is generous, but demanding’ or ‘this other person is selfish’…if you can see all of these things you have a social environment that is very rich.”
“That’s what we we set out to do…we’re still doing it and we’re still not done,” Maietti added as he wrapped up the talk. “We’re not particularly happy with where we are, there’s so much more than we need to do.”
