Scopely is lining up a “megadeal” acquisition for 2025, says chief revenue officer Tim O’Brien.
The Monopoly Go maker’s M&A team has access to parent company Savvy’s $38bn acquisition warchest, says O’Brien, who laid out Scopely’s plans during a subscriber-only Q&A at Variety’s Entertainment & Technology Summit, transcribed by mobilegamer.biz.
When asked about what 2025 might bring for Scopely, O’Brien told Variety: “I hope that we announce at least one megadeal. When I say megadeal, I mean a scaled global franchise doing hopefully at least a billion dollars in revenue.”
He later added that Scopely has privately made “smaller investments” recently, and hasn’t announced any large deals yet – “but you’ll hear about some coming up, probably pretty soon.”
Earlier in the session O’Brien said that Scopely’s M&A team is the “tip of the spear” for the deployment of the $38bn Savvy Games Group has earmarked for games acquisitions.
“It’s a pretty incredible opportunity, actually, because the power of Scopely and Savvy Games Group is that [Savvy] has $38 billion to deploy…and I think in the last year, after partnering with Savvy, they’ve realized that our corporate M&A team and our organization is the right place to deploy that capital through.”
On the subject of acquisition targets, O’Brien said: “We’re looking for world class game development talent. We’re looking for evergreen franchises, businesses that are extremely stable and ideally growing and at scale.”
He later added: “If you’re looking to exit or partner up to go even bigger, we’re the right place to be.”
While not all of the $38bn will be deployed through Scopely’s M&A team, O’Brien said that the Monopoly Go maker is ready to “go out and do some big things in the industry” and has a “global BD and corporate development organization out talking to game developers every day in China, Japan, South America, across Europe.”
“We spent a good amount of time on strategy and what we want to accomplish, which should be to become the largest games company in the world. And we’re out getting ready to execute that right now.”
O’Brien also touched upon the performance of Monopoly Go during the chat, and stated that “the game today, a year and a half later, has significantly better KPIs than when it launched.”
Elsewhere in the Q&A O’Brien added that Scopely had doubled in size since the Savvy acquisition closed, and gave his assessment of how Scopely has weathered the storm hanging over the games business in the last couple of years.
“Like many industries, the games industry had a number a large layoffs the last couple years – we’re very fortunate that we have not – in fact, we’ve been growing at an accelerated rate,” he said.
“I think that the forward thinking, more sophisticated gaming businesses that already have scale have a unique advantage. Us having scale, global infrastructure and 30 plus billion dollars in capital deployed to continue to consolidate world class game teams gives us a really unique advantage in the marketplace right now.”
