Mobile eSports company Skillz continues to shore up resources even as audiences multiple five-fold. The company as recently granted two new patents: one of which enables Skillz to evaluate how much of the outcome of a given game depends on skill vs. chance, while the other allows developers to implement the Skillz Tournament Management System entirely through self service. Cynopsis eSports spoke with company CEO Andrew Paradise about its growth, mobile trends and its recent revelation that game developer partners are achieving more than eight times the mobile gaming industry’s average revenue per daily active user.
Paradise on the benefits of eSports: We were pretty excited to see that recent piece in the Wall Street Journal showing that eSports will be a $5 billion business by 2020. For us, we see that developing an eSports infrastructure can be one of the most powerful tools you can have for enhancing engagement, retention and revenue. Recently we announced that Skillz’ developer partners are achieving about eight times the mobile gaming industry’s average. In terms of engagement, we are seeing about twice the average time spent in game. Those are both pretty incredible numbers. If you put a game in that competition system and in the broadcasting system, even an older piece of content can be refreshed by enabling it as an eSport.
On growth: We served 8 million minutes of footage last year and this year we will serve 40 million minutes. We a tracking at about 5x and we think that next year will be even bigger. Twitch has shown that mobile viewing is now about a third of all viewership, so when I think about what eSports viewing will look like in a couple of years, we feel that it will hold the lion’s share of viewership and that leaves us in a great position to engage brands.
On demographics: In the console and computer eSports world is that it is very male and very 18-24 year old. What’s fascinating in the mobile eSports world is that we are seeing a much higher concentration of female players. So currently, Skillz is 45% female player and 55% male player across all the studios that we power. That’s with over 10 million players.
On its recent patents: Our two recent patents are really designed to set up the mobile eSports industry for long-term success. We are big proponents of having the technology to build for both the developers and for the players. Developers don’t have the opportunity to build an eSports infrastructure organically, we can offer them the resources to build a system.
