Scopely raises $55m - helping brands build interactive experiences

With the mobile game market expected to grow to $45 billion by 2020, CEO of Scopely Walter Driver said he sees massive opportunity by taking advantage of a new mainstream-gamification of interactive entertainment. He says... "Most brands don't have interactive experiences. We have a sustainable publishing platform to systematically bring mainstream IP (intellectual property) to the audiences that care about them."

"Scopely sees itself as an interactive entertainment network . " 

He has convinced Venture Capital -invest a further $55m in addition to the $43m already invested! Current VC includes Greycroft Partners, Elephant Partners, Sands Capital Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Evolution Media Capital, Take-Two Interactive Software, e.ventures. 

Scopely is a game producer and distributor, focusing on free games - taking market share from Zynga - 

 It has a $200 million annual run rate, with a 600 percent growth rate over the last 10 months. 

The company also announced a new partnership with WWE to launch a free mobile game, "WWE Champions." 

This comes after a string of best-sellers: Last year Scopely released a "Walking Dead" game "Road to Survival," which hit more than 4 million downloads in its first week, 10 million downloads in its first 90 days. 

CEO Walter Driver says that they have built a central business and technology infrastructure to turn brands into IP again and again."


"Road to Survival" is the start-up's sixth consecutive No. 1 selling game. 

Scopely teamed up with Hasbro to release "Yahtzee with Buddies," which is still a top-40 grossing game. Driver projects that the game will generate $650 million in revenue over five years, noting that Scopely is the only game company with two different genre games in the top-grossing charts. 

The company has eight more games in development, four that are expected to launch this year. 


"We're able to have success in many different genres because we're able to work with game studios that have expertise in different genres," said Driver, who says this gives the company the advantage of diversified revenue streams.

"We have so much data that it enables us to know which genres are going to be good businesses, and good businesses for a long period of time. We can leverage the data we have — the attributes of users that are most relevant for the game — to figure out how we can market products so they can outperform."