Apparently it earned this dubious honor purely from marketing... It has a marketing budget of 1 billion dollars. But it's allegedly made 5 billion, so... guess it was worth it to someone.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Funny, this is the first I've heard of it.
Me too. My guess is that the marketing was targeted mostly towards kids.
Also on Grindr. Every other ad.
Definitely not. Other way around. Millennial/Gen X +
I'm not sure I see that either, those generations know how dangerous and damaging monopoly is. You're not a monopoly fan and still have friends or family....
Seriously, Monopoly is one of the worst games in existence.
But that's expected, since the game it cloned was actually two games, the one was like the current Monopoly, the other one had a property tax system and that one was so balanced that the game never ended. Both games were not made to be played for fun, but to show how different taxation systems lead to different outcomes. They were serious, non-fun games on purpose.
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Its marketing is 99% on shitty mobile games that have adds everywhere. If you don’t play shitty mobile games or have a DNS level add block you won’t see it.
inb4 OP is on the marketing team
I've never even heard of it. Is that successful marketing?
Well you wouldn't have spent any money on it and they're raking in the dough, so yes actually.
If you aren't the kind of person to blow money on a shitty mobile game, an effective marketing campaign won't target you.
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Sorry to make this seem even worse, this isn't even what you think it is. Not a Niantic gps game.
It's literally like any other mobile board game. You hit the dice roll button and the piece bounces around the board and your cash goes up. That's about it. It's interactive because sometimes where you land takes money away from other players (those you have friended or randos)
There is nothing novel here.
source: my children forced me to play with them when it was super trendy. All of their friends (and their friends parents) were playing. So. Many. Popups. It was CONSTANTLY trying to get you to spend. We did not, but know people who poured money in to keep the dice rolling
edit: also thank you for this, I always like my kids to be aware of why they or their friends are doing something. They're hyper aware of trends and marketing (but also don't want to be left behind when their friends are doing something new).
Damn, thanks for the insight. I just read the wiki article and the source claiming the marketing budget of that game, because I couldn't believe it, and the name Niantic was somewhere in there, so I figured Niantic did what Niantic does. Apparently, it's not even that.
It's ridiculous, seriously. Monopoly is a horrible game in it self, and I thought everyone and their dog was already sick of it, but I guess I'm just projecting.
Or pumping the equivalent of the GDP of Samoa into the marketing of some stupid mobile game version of this really bad board game really does something.
Even funnier, I told my kids it was the most expensive video game and they said, "oh because of Chris Pratt?"
Apparently the ads all featured Chris Pratt.
That's just nuts.
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Aka money laundering.
Who the fuck audits a "gaming" company??
No one
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And all marketing budget at that, we don't even know what it cost to develop.
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Monopoly, stripped of it's context as a political statement, is a very mean and cruel work of art.
It shows that capitalism will market anything, even critique against capitalism.
It's the board game equivalent of people buying Che Guevara T-shirts at Primark.
Say the line, Joyce
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The story behind it is also quintessential capitalist bullshit
This is extra funny because not only is the gameplay shit on purpose, it's shit on purpose as a criticism of capitalism.
Monopoly is supposed to be frustrating as a reflection of how frustrating life is under capitalism, and here comes capitalism to sell an even more annoying version full of popups and money grabs.
The death of satire is a well with no end.
I'm more of a board game connoisseur and seeing people play monopoly when there is a whole ecosystem of much better designed board games out there that either already have dedicated apps or good online implementations absolutely enrages me :<
So many people think board games are just not something they like. And if you ask them what they played before, it's always any combination of Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, Trivial Pursuit, Risk or the Game of Life.
If you look at the list of the top 20 best selling games of all time (https://moneyinc.com/highest-selling-board-games-of-all-time/), all of them are somewhere between terrible, bad and lower end of mediocre.
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I don't count marketing as part of a videogame budget.
You might not. Finance and wikipedia does.
Why was it so expensive?
Literally all marketing. $1B in marketing.
I honestly feel kind of proud that I've never heard of it. Off the grid and shit.
I'm hardly "off the grid", but I've managed to get enough distance between my eyeballs and the fire hose of ads not to see it more than tangentially, while pocking around the Google Play store.
I do pity anyone who doesn't have the kind of tech-friendly elders willing/able to scrub all the bloatware off their retail devices, though. Had to spent an hour de-contaminating my mom's new Samsung because of all the random extra adware packed into it. And with newer mainline devices, it feels like a constant struggle. Heaven help anyone on Windows 11.
I’m the one who my friends turn to for tech advice and omg I am so horrified that some of them never installed an adblocker before. Or just leave preinstalled garbage like mcafee around…
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Ads. $1 Billion marketing budget.
Imagine what a gaming company with a $1billion budget for the game itself (and execs who stay the fuck out of the way instead of repeatedly changing direction...cough...EA.....cough) and a marketing budget for whatever they actually spent on the game. We could have had Cyberpunk 4154 with a bit left over.
To be honest, I think there is diminishing returns on more money (look at star citizen for example).
I feel like it would end up a live service game (where the extra money results in content over a long period of time) or just become bloated.
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Most stupid game ever created. Downloaded it and played for 15 minutes then Uninstalled. What a waste of 15 minutes.
Monopoly go is a mint card game like, but don't think a video game version needs to be that heavily marketed. Also I didn't even know it had a video game adaptation, so where the fuck did that money go?
Edit: I'm wrong on the game. I was thinking of Monopoly deal. I don't know what go is.
Tbh, marketing is mostly just a scam to funnel money to marketing people.
You are not entirely wrong. It's a boubble where no person involved benefits from saying "hey, is our budget too big?" It's basicly given, that any known brand have negative ROI on it's marketing, but we are all, so brainwashed with need for growrh, that that we know only one solution to decreasing results. Throw more money at it.
There's a reason many big corporations have pulled out of online advertisment and focus on print/radio/TV/sponsorships instead: The effectiveness of online advertisment can be measured and it sucks royally.
The whole concept of marketing is just a huge game of "the emperor's new clothes". Nobody wants to be blamed if they stop doing marketing and it turns out to actually do have an effect, even if everyone secretly knows it's garbage.
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My dad (in his 50s) spends a lot of his free time playing it. Like, over an hour every day. It takes the worst and most addictive parts of every brainrot game ever made and rolls them all into one thing. Clearly it's been worth it. 🤦
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