How Monopoly Go's Pets Season sparked 12,000 fan submissions and community engagement

• Monopoly Go's Pets Season includes nine collectable stickers based on real players' pets.
• From 12,000 submissions, a committee decided on winners to be represented in the Monopoly Go artstyle.
• The idea for a community gallery set was spawned at the Pocket Gamer Awards 2025.
• Pets Season's first weeks featured a charity tie-in with the RSPCA and ASPCA.

Mobile games giant Scopely launched its latest Monopoly Go season in February with a focus on animals and the player community.

Aptly named Pets Season, the period has seen original pet-themed tokens added to the mobile game, joining one of the Monopoly brand’s best-known tokens, Scottish terrier Scottie.

At the same time, Scopely has leveraged the opportunity to further connect with fans - having run a contest to bring players’ real-life pets as collectable stickers in-game. Furthermore, by playing the game this season, fans have supported charities like the RSPCA and ASPCA.

To learn more about Pets Season’s origins, community engagement and charity work, we speak with Monopoly Go VP, product management Beth Nations, as well as director of content design Phil Williams.

"We started building our Discord server back in 2023, and the Scottie Channel, obviously named as a tribute to Mr. Monopoly’s iconic companion, has consistently been our most popular off-topic channel for the last three years. So, completely organically, players are sharing hundreds of photos of their pets and their stories with each other. We've been observing and monitoring this for a long period of time," Nations reveals.

"We do biannual, very deep community surveys, and in our winter survey in 2024 we had asked our players what types of themes they would like to see come into the game. Pets was the most highly voted one."

She adds that the idea for a community gallery set followed in the summer of 2025, when a conversation took place in-person between a Monopoly Go community manager and director of product at the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards. The event will return in 2026.

Players, pets and a personal touch

Pets Season began on February 4th and runs until April 7th, 2026. It marks the latest instalment in Monopoly Go’s seasonal model, which promises players a new theme and content approximately every two months.

While additional content can drop during these seasonal timespans - such as a limited-time Hello Kitty and Friends crossover - the main draws are the themed characters, boards and cosmetics. Nations notes that through this model, players always know when to expect something fresh and innovative, even if they don’t know what the next theme will be.

In the largest-scale effort yet to integrate player identity into Monopoly Go, Pets Season has introduced a sticker collection inspired by fans’ own furry, feathery and scaly companions. To achieve this, Scopely leveraged its active Discord community, sending out the prompt: Show us your pets living their best tycoon life.

Fans sent in 12,000 submissions - five or six times the team’s expectation - which had to be narrowed down into a shortlist of 100 pets and eventually nine winners. Those winners have since been recreated in Monopoly Go’s artstyle, now featuring in an in-game sticker album.

"It's actually the very first set in the album, so the first thing you experience when you open the album is seeing the nine pets that won our Discord contest come to life," Nations explains.

"It's really important that we do this representation as stickers because they’re so social, so giftable, so tradable, and also so visible in the game. Everyone can earn and celebrate these community pets.

"We have a few other places where we try to allow players to influence the game, like what stickers might be tradable that otherwise wouldn't be tradable, but I think this is the first time we've done anything in the album space that's also included this original art and visualisation component."

Nations adds that each photograph was manually reviewed to form the shortlist, then a committee assembled to determine the winners. Among the winning pets were Brian the duck, who already had an Instagram following, and Stella the chinchilla.

"I was in that committee, and it's quite possibly one of the best meetings I've been in," Williams recalls.

"We wanted to get a really good representation across a broad spectrum of pets - we didn't want it to just be cats and dogs, although I adore cats and dogs - so we wanted to make sure that there were some slightly interesting pets in there too, that hit those tycoon life guidelines as well, which is why we've got a chinchilla and we've got a dog and David Froggy."

A further five pets who didn't make the sticker collection have instead been appearing on Monopoly Go's social media channels.

Introductions and innovations

Beyond collectable stickers, Monopoly Go’s Pets Season has also introduced new playable tokens based on animals. As is standard for the title, players who unlock them during the season can continue to play as them after.

Among the established pets are Scottie the dog, who has long been a companion of Mr. Monopoly, and the posh cat Duke. New creations include the zen parrot Pip, rabbit Nibbles and Williams’ personal favourite, Turbo the tortoise.

Williams explains how the tokens were designed with a range of personalities and characteristics. Scottie and Mr Monopoly share similar "childlike qualities", meanwhile Duke is more of an aristocrat.

And, starting with Pets Season, there is also a new type of token for players to collect called Style Tokens. These come with customisation options, allowing players to dress compatible characters in a range of accessories. Nations argues that while the community-centred stickers have broader reach to players at any engagement level, it’s these Style Tokens that are the big innovation this update.

"Style Tokens went through a lot of different stages," says Williams. "We knew what the intention was, and then we went through a lot of design iterations trying to make sure it’s easily understandable for players. It’s a casual game where we want to show not tell, so there’s lots of ways that we have to try and make sure it’s a really fun and easily accessible experience.

"The fact that we’re giving players the opportunity to customise tokens for the first time - it felt really appropriate to do this during Pets Season because we know our players love their animals, and pets are such a big part of everyone's lives."

He teases that the characters featured during Pets Season will, where appropriate, appear in future events: "We've got biographies for each of those animals. We’re making sure we know where they fit in that universe, so they will return. You will see them - they're not just a one-season-only."

Pets and purpose

Another side of Pets Season is its charity tie-in, Play with Purpose. As the first Monopoly Go season to implement a charity initiative as part of its core strategy, Scopely promised fans at the outset that it would donate to the RSPCA and ASPCA.

Larger donations were on the cards if players could collectively pass ‘Go’ at least five million times during the first month of the season, giving them until March 4th to hit the target. Players went on to achieve this by February 17th, netting the RSCPA £110,000 and the ASPCA $350,000.

"In terms of the partnership design itself, we really wanted to make it pretty lightweight in terms of what players were being asked to do in order to see their efforts represented. Just by playing the game and doing things in the core loop, you were automatically kind of earning credits towards supporting this partnership," Nations explains.

"The idea is, as Phil said, making things really simple for users to understand and not adding to the cognitive load of the other things we're encouraging you to do in the game every day. It was really important that we kept it light-touch."

The RSPCA has utilised the partnership to promote animals who share a likeness to Monopoly Go's pets - highlighting a puppy called Scottie, a longhaired cat called Duke and a 10-year-old crossbreed called Mr Monopoly. Duke is still waiting to be rehomed.

Pets Season wraps up on April 7th. Nations suggests a charity tie-in for future seasons shouldn’t necessarily be expected, but if such an initiative does take place, it won’t be forced, but organic.

Scopely has just celebrated 15 years since its founding - and more than $15 billion in lifetime revenue. Representatives from the company are set to attend and speak at Pocket Gamer Connects Barcelona on June 15th to 16th.