Two games companies made it into Time100's latest influential brands list – and, weirdly, you may never have heard of one of them
Well, unless you're big into the board game where you can play as the lil hat.
If you haven't spent 600 hours of your life playing mobile games on the toilet, you might not be familiar with Scopely, the company behind Monopoly Go. However, it's one of just two game development companies to have made Time Magazine's annual list of the most influential companies.
Yup, as you can see in the full list here (thanks, Pocket Tactics), the mobile gaming giant behind the most lucrative thing that the Monopoly Man's done since his board game began causing family units to shatter like droopy moustaches coated in liquid nitrogen has cracked the top 100, with Fortnite creator Epic Games being the only other company in the industry to make it.
Well, that's unless you count Nvidia being lauded for its AI stuff, and Microsoft as a whole being on there for, er, "making stratgic moves", which as it turns out is just code for more AI shite in this case. But back to Scopley and Monopoly Go, which has casually raked in $2 billion since it launched in April 2023.
How's it done that, you ask? Well, I assume just by giving people a way to play Monopoly without actually having to be in the same room as the friends and family members it'll inevitably ruin your relatioship with, delivered in a manner that has plenty of fun events - at least one of which sounds a bit like what your mum sometimes does to your dad - and promotions that keep people coming back for more.
It's pretty much the standard absurdly popular mobile game formula stuff like this always follows to a degree, just with the added ability to play as a thimble, a fantasy we've all had since we were little.
So yeah, congrats Scopely. Oh, and if you're in the mood for more Monopoly Go, make sure to use our guides to keep track of things like when the next partner event will take place.