Scopely Sees Growth With Mobile Games That Live On

Mobile games are a fickle business, in which one-time hits can quickly fade into oblivion. Scopely, the startup behind popular mobile games like “Star Trek Fleet Command” and “The Walking Dead: Road to Survival,” believes it has come up with a system to minimize that risk.

Central to Scopely’s success, says chairman and co-CEO Walter Driver, is the publishing platform behind the company’s games, a collection of software tools that help developers more quickly create mobile games, keep them fresh with new content and generate revenue from them. It seems to be working for the Los Angeles–based company, which says it saw revenue jump 80% in 2018 from the prior year. Scopely, which earns money for its free games through advertising and in-app purchases of virtual goods, says it had an annual revenue run rate of more than $400 million, based on its January performance.