Few entertainment brands have been as dominant in the UK for as long as Monopoly has, and as we commence 2024, a new rendition of the game has re-established it as the outright king. Of course, towards the end of 2023, the classic, variant, and brand new editions of Monopoly came out en masse for the Christmas-to-New-Year window, truly testing ties of family and friends. Perhaps it’s this original experience of the board game that’s helped to inspire a further surge of the hit new mobile game.
Monopoly Go! was released earlier in the spring of 2023, rapidly becoming a hit. In fact, the Scopely-made version of the board game collected $1 billion in revenues a mere seven months after it hit app stores around the world. It’s a level of success for a free mobile game practically unseen since everyone went out to find certain pocket monsters in the summer of 2016. Boasting the biggest launch for a casual game since 2018, even the trailer on YouTube has over 14 million views. Still, it’s not the only way that Monopoly continues to dominate in the UK.
Even Redditch has its own Monopoly
What began as a board game with a mode for anti-monopolists and one for all-out competition for the monopoly that appealed to university students and leftwing intellectuals was eventually pivoted into the fixed-play Monopoly that we know today. Once the Parker Brothers got a hold of the idea and worked out how to market the board game, it started to fly off of the shelves, selling hundreds of millions of copies around the world. In fact, some estimates put Monopoly board game sales at over 275 million since its 1935 release.
Over the last couple of decades, the brand has become more inventive, departing from the original format in many different ways to keep Monopoly fresh and to increase its broad appeal into several niche areas. To begin with, it would introduce card payments rather than cash and new themes that were, for all intents and purposes, the same as the original but with a different board. One of these was the Redditch Monopoly edition that was released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the town in 2013 but was still available at the Kingfisher store as recently as 2022.
Toying with the core concept a little further are editions like The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, and Marvel Spider-Man. Each one offers an additional way to get around the board, another danger to consider, or a new way to win other than property dominance. Still, what’s enabled the reach of Monopoly to grow in the modern market has been the brand’s quick and evolving adoption of the digital entertainment space.
Monopoly Go! only the most recent digital outing
Uncle Pennybags has been an animated character for digital versions of Monopoly for decades. Monopoly has been a mainstay in its most basic form on digital platforms since the 1985 Computer Edition of Monopoly, but where the game has diversified the most is on another computer-based platform. At many of the highest-rated real money casinos in the UK, Monopoly is present in the live and slots sections. These two sections are of the greatest focus for reviewers as these games are what really matter in casino gaming. Monopoly is one of the most popular brands here, thanks to the likes of Monopoly Big Baller and the brand-new Monopoly Travel World Tour. While these games are also playable on mobile, it’s on the app stores that the board game is even more dominant. Among the top-paid games, Monopoly has been a top-15 mainstay since its inception. Right now, only behind slot game app Coin Master, Monopoly Go! is the second-highest-grossing app game in the UK. Monopoly is now a huge hit in premium and freemium gaming, boasting millions of downloads between the two apps in the UK alone.
Monopoly Go! is the latest way to play the board game that’s remained a household staple in the UK for the better part of a century. Being free-to-start and on mobile, it ticks the boxes for convenience and accessibility, so it was bound to be a hit from launch.
