Original Release: Skillz, 2012, Web browser
Other Releases: Android / iOS (2012)
The platform that promises to turn any game into an “esport,” Skillz has hundreds of competitive arcade-style and card games that can be wagered on
Skillz (Android, Skillz, 2012)
Where to Buy: Free to play in “practice mode”, wagering requires making a deposit
How to Emulate: Android Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Just before the pandemic, land-based casinos were really starting to dabble in offering competitive player-vs-player video games that incorporate skill into the usual luck-based process. This has been going on online almost since the internet became common in households, however, and Skillz.com has been probably the biggest name in this area since it launched in 2012.
The money-making model on the business end is the “rake,” which you’ll already be familiar with if you know anything about casino poker rooms. The typical casino game is you vs The House, but with skill-based games the house simply puts people together to wager directly against each other and takes a small percentage of the action (the rake) as basically a facilitator fee.
Then you got the legal model. Skillz is available internationally (their website touts it as being available to “80%” of the world, unclear if they mean that by country or by population though) but is San Francisco-based and definitely has a US focus. That means getting around weird US gambling laws, which prohibit casino games throughout most of the country but leave a weird patchwork of state-based loopholes for “games of skill.” So, for US players, Skillz is available in all but about 10 states, and then there are a couple of other where just the games that involve playing cards are forbidden.
The basic structure of it all will be familiar if you’ve ever dabbled with DraftKings or anything like that; you’re required to put some amount of money up to either play one-off games against others or enter a tournament. There seems to be a free practice mode for most games, and there’s a skill-matching system that’s supposed to keep you from being blown away by more experienced players.
So how well does all of this work?
Game Selection and Security Concerns
Here’s the absolute first thing that caught my eye when I started to browse the Skillz website:
This is kind of an odd way to advertise. First of all, 2 out of every 100 people that actually attempt to make a game eventually coming up with something enjoyable actually tracks (if anything it’s probably a generous estimate). The issue is, aside from the other 98% making a product no one really wants, there’s going to be a whole lot of scammers in the mix looking to harvest personal info and/or install keyloggers and malware and such (see: thousands of crummy little games by fly-by-night publishers cluttering up the app stores).
Thus Skillz already has my cybersecurity radar up from first contact, if nothing else. It has been in operation for about a decade now, however, without major incident reports floating around. And a cursory sampling of the available games (with a throwaway account) reveals that they are largely fairly polished and some are even enjoyable to play; one of the best is a pretty good zombie shooter that’s like a combination of House of the Dead and the Challenge levels from the TimeSplitters series. If there’s a game concept out there somebody found a way to get it on here, there’s even competitive Solitaire.
So Skillz HQ is apparently doing at least a decent job of filtering for general quality and polish. That says nothing about cybersecurity and respect for your personal data when playing on a mobile device, though I don’t have the capacity for a personal deep dive into that; my analysis is limited to their Privacy Policy, which confirms that they collect personal data (including location information) and transfer to third parties (ie data brokers), and searching for data privacy complaints, which doesn’t turn up anything but is tough because outlets for complaints are naturally chock-a-bloc with people complaining about how their money wuz tooken by the platform instead (standard fare for any gambling site, tons of self-inflicted sour grapes about not understanding how bonus funds work or just plain losing mixed with what might be legitimate complaints of malfeasance, always hard to separate the two).
How Skillz Makes Their Money: The Rake
At the outset we touched on the “rake” concept, which is how Skillz makes the bulk of its money from players. This manifests as an “entrance fee” to play most games that involve real money, rather than a percentage from each pot (as you would generally see at a poker table).
An up-front fee is already more unfavorable than a house tax on winnings, as it launches you into each game at negative expected value that has to be overcome before you can even start thinking about profit. It’s the way of the world with these sorts of DraftKings-modeled “casino alternative” online sites, but this one is more brutal than most. The actual rake varies given the entry fee for a particular game, but in general it seems to be well above 15% no matter what you play, and that’s charged to you win or lose. The fantasy sports sites are generally under 15% and table poker is generally well under 10%, just for a basis of comparison.
Casinos also often offset the rake to a substantial degree via their “loyalty programs.” Skillz sort of has this in the form of “Ticketz”, but the range of options for cashing them in is rather limited. Mostly they seem to be used to cover entry fees, and for crummy Skillz-branded merchandise (“pay to be our walking billboard!”). They do seem to pop up with “gifts” you can cash them in for periodically that are like the limited-time prizes that senior-oriented brick and mortar casinos offer, things like cookware sets or a fondue pot or whatever. No particularly exciting possibilities.
Withdrawals do appear to be free, except for a $1.50 fee for closing out an account that is under $10. It also has the dreaded “inactivity fee” of $2 taken from whatever balance you have left each month if you don’t log in and play something at least once every six months.
Gameplay, Odds and Fair Competition
From what I can see most of the games do appear to be truly skill-based and something that you can practice to improve at. The main issue is that the design of them also intends to incorporate simple fast-twitch player speed, which causes a few obvious problems. One is a natural bias toward younger players and those without disabilities or hand/arm injuries. The other is opening a door for client-side cheating, which from all accounts appears to be a thing that continually happens on the site.
Now, if cheating is possible, and ESPECIALLY if real money is involved, you should anticipate some sort of client-side anti-cheat software. Which is another can of worms entirely. These things tend to have trouble being effective without essentially rooting your computer and having a disturbing level of administrative access. Sometimes they just mess up your drivers and system processes. So this is definitely something you want to investigate before you invite it onto your devices. Unfortunately, according to their developer docs, Skillz leaves anti-cheat measures up to the individual developer. So God knows what (if anything) each one is doing. You need to do due diligence on every single game to determine if a) cheaters can run rampant or b) they’re going to deploy some sort of kernel-level invasive or destructive software on your system.
Reviews from various sites across the internet indicate to me that the pendulum tends to swing more toward “allow cheaters to run rampant.” I haven’t been through this personally, but testimony from multiple other Skillz users indicates that refunds for cheating are only initiated if cheaters can be spotted doing mathematically or statistically impossible things in the in-game replay feature. But here’s the kicker: replay appears to be a completely optional feature that developers do not have to include, and some choose not to. If they don’t, what’s your recourse against a cheater? I have no idea.
Amidst all these online reviews I’ve also seen multiple horror stories of balances being locked away for “cheating” for weeks/months at a time. Now it’s impossible to know what actually happened, but these users claim in some cases that they caught a cheater, reported it, and then their own funds were locked for “cheating” in what appeared to be retaliation for making waves in the pond. The most important and concrete takeaway is that Skillz operates on a Paypal-like system where it is not a bank or credit provider, is not regulated as such, and can do arbitrary things with your money like lock it away for weeks/months under some vague claim of “suspicion.” Reportedly they also regularly call winning players in for Zoom meetings to “verify” that they aren’t cheating.
There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary, but let’s cut Skillz an infinite amount of slack and say that it does provide an absolutely fair platform that cannot be cheated without eventual detection. Even in this environment, you’re up against 80% of the world. That’s a lot of people in poor countries with little going on, few financial prospects and lots of time on their hands to get obsessively good through repetition. Or to just suss out new and clever ways to cheat. Not only that, this seems like it would be a magnet for organized crime; not just to assign mooks to figure out how to cheat with hacking tools, but also the potential double-dip of having an outlet for money laundering.
Ask any poker shark, player pool evaluation is a big part of the game. That’s a real rough pool to be playing in.
The Big Yikes
It does seem that Skillz offers legitimately skill-based games that one can actually practice and get better at, and that the platform works and pays as agreed. You COULD pick around amidst the games and maybe find workable opportunities here and there. There are too many other red flags for me to personally consider it worth my time as a money-making platform, though: unregulated money-freezing policies, security and privacy concerns, running into cheaters, the excessive rake, etc.
Sadly, given the general state of things it seems like the best opportunity for making money is actually to figure out how to cheat – there certainly appears to be wiggle room in which it isn’t policed properly. This is basically a case study in something the gambling industry really has to figure out going forward if it’s serious about onboarding skill-based gaming at casinos and such.
One last thing to consider, there is a non-zero possibility of this whole platform crumbling under you just as you get going. Shareholders presently have it in court on accusations of overvaluing itself, and it’s been peppered with other individual lawsuits that raise more questions about how it operates.
Links
Developer documents repository
(alleged) cheat tracker forum