The numbers speak for themselves: 5 billion hours of gameplay in 12 months. That’s the going rate of business activity at Scopely , the mobile gaming giant behind such popular titles as “Monopoly Go!” and “Pokémon Go.”

Tim O’Brien, chief revenue officer of Scopely, traced the arc of mobile gaming’s rise as an economic force as well as serving as a wide funnel to draw consumers deeper into the medium of video games as an entertainment option.

The dawn of the iPhone in 2007 was really Year One for mobile gaming, although titles did exist before then, O’Brien told Jennifer Maas, Variety ‘s senior business writer for TV and gaming.

“Things really took off when [Steve] Jobs and Apple launched the original iPhone in 2007, which going back to that day, actually, it was a closed ecosystem.

See Full Page