From Forbes
For anyone who’s been waiting years to make a dollar from the hundreds of hours spent honing their skills on phone games, the moment has arrived. A new San Francisco startup called Skillz just launched the US’s first platform for real-money gambling on mobile games, and it could be the start of an industry worth tens of billions, if not more.
The key to Skillz is that while casino style-games have been waiting for legislation that legalizes online betting for games of chance, gambling on games of skill is already legal in 36 states. My fellow Louisianans and I are out of luck, but the majority of America is ready to play. Founder and CEO Andrew Paradise remembers hanging out at the arcade as a kid. People would stack quarters on the machines — a sign that there was a contest going on. That’s why he set the standard bet on Skillz at 25 cents — for him, it’s the same thing.
“There’s a sweet spot in between betting, real money gaming, and mobile gaming,” he says. “There’s a lot of thirst for betting in games of chance, but we see this great need for games of skill, as well.”
There are some nice statistics from the company’s first week of operation. One game tripled daily revenue, another found their players playing for three times longer. Questing after points and virtual coins has already proven its ability to get us hopelessly sucked into virtual worlds, so it stands to reason that US dollars are even more effective. Skillz operates a lot of small scale tournaments between friends — four people kick in a dollar, the winner takes home the pot.
