Lots of people have been talking about $SKLZ so I thought I'd take a look. Here are some notes after playing a couple of games and taking a cursory look at their developer docs.

1. The two games I played were fun and addictive. These are definitely not AAA titles but are also not cheap extractive gimmicks. I believe it when they say that an average user spends 62 mins a day on these games.

2. Once you get past the initial friction of bringing real money into the game, it's very easy to keep playing 60 cents games again and again.

3. You get additional $10 when you join. It eases you into playing cash games as it feels less risky to play with someone else's money

4. Your cash balance carries over to other Skillz games reducing the friction in trying them out. The UI is consistent too.

5. Lack of ads and micro-transactions keeps the experience focused on the game play which, I'm sure, leads to higher time spent.

6. I don't think there's a network effect here. I didn't feel the need to invite my friends and play against them. And I didn't interact with other people I was playing against.

7. Developer docs seemed focused on building a Skillz app rather than integrating the functionality into an existing app. The framework is meant to be the central entity driving everything. That's how the apps felt so similar, I think...

... So this is about providing a better monetization model to indie developers rather than going after big game studios at least for now.

8. It integrates with Unity making it accessible to a large number of indie game developers.

9. Apple does not allow in-app purchases for real money gaming (Section 5.3 in App Store guidelines). That works well for $SKLZ as it gets to keep a bigger part of the GMV. There's a chance this could change. Current numbers seem too low for Apple to care but this is a risk.

Overall, I think there's enough here to trust their estimate of 555m revenue and 3.8b GMV in 2022 which makes the current valuation of 7b seem pretty reasonable. I'm taking a medium-sized bet.

cc @Soumyazen, @skaushi whose tweets made me curious about the company.