I Spent 8 Hours Playing Money Making Games

In this video, I spend 8 hours trying out money-making mobile games! It went about as well as expected...

Let the games begin

So first up, I started with Word Race, which is a game through the Skillz platform. If you want to try your luck w/ Skillz games yourself, you can get some bonus cash with my affiliate link here.

You basically start off with a few practice games to get the hang of the gameplay before you dive in with real money. Once I was comfortable with it, I started playing $1 games – which means you pay 60 cents and play heads up against an opponent and the winner takes the $1 prize – and Skillz gets to pocket the additional 20 cents.

As you advance in skill level, they will adjust your matchups so you supposedly play people who are at a similar level to you, so the games remain competitive.

I ended up playing a majority of $5 games. The buy-in here is $3, with the winner taking $5.

Lunch break

After lunch, I broke my win streak with some losses. After a couple of hours, I was up $17.60, which was pretty good.

Then, I decided to try out some more games. I tried out Strike by Bowlero, which is a bowling game. I spent maybe 15 minutes trying to get the hang of it, but I never felt confident enough in my abilities to play a paid game and decided to look for something else.

I downloaded Solitaire Cash, which is another platform outside of the Skillz network, but it works similarly. I played a game… and then remembered I just don’t like playing solitaire that much and again, didn’t think I was good enough to compete for real money, so I decided to go back to Skillz and see what other games they had.

One of the more popular games is called Blackout Bingo. Now, I’ve never played a bingo game on my phone before so I had no idea how they would make this a competitive battle. But basically, it all comes down to strategically using power-ups to maximize your score.

These booster power-up things range from the ability to daub an extra space that hasn’t been called, to these golden ball things which allow you to select a specific number from your board to be called, but the trick is you don’t get to look at your board as you pick, so it can be hard to remember which ones you really need. There’s also a 2x point multiplier and additional time power-ups.

Anyways, it’s a pretty fast-paced game, and the highest score wins. Honestly this game was really fun and kind of gets the adrenaline pumping which is weird when you think about competing for a dollar, but hey, it was a good time.

I spent a long time in the dollar matches trying to get the hang of the right strategy. I checked out reddit and YouTube for some tips and tricks as well, and I felt like I was starting to get the hang of it.

The thing is, since the pacing is really fast, you really have to focus and make sure you don’t make little mistakes. Accidentally screwing up one of the power-ups can easily cost you the game, which happened to me several times. Also, you are usually running down to the wire trying to get as many last second bingos you can manage, and several times I just didn’t hit the bingo button in time for it to count all of my bingos before time ran out.

So it really takes focus and precision, which I realize all sounds pretty weird when we’re just talking about bingo, but that’s the way this game goes.

I decided to give my brain a break and switch to Pool Payday. This reminded me of those old pool games from Windows 98 or whatever. Again, did a few practice games to get the hang of it. This too, was pretty fun, and I’m sure with more practice I could probably have a better win percentage. You get extra points for trick shots or hitting a ball into a pocket with a 10x multiplier, so that keeps things interesting. I stuck around the 60 cent buy-in games since I never felt like I was good enough to advance to the next level. I ended up winning 8 games and losing 7, but because when you win you net a 40 cent profit and when you lose, you’re out 60 cents, I still ended up losing $1.

I ended up switching back to Bingo because, well, it’s pretty addictive. It’s got that strangely simple yet complex, and challenging yet fun combinations going on.

I ended up playing 83 games. I won 44 of those, but since I lost more at higher stakes, I ended up in the whole about $50. Whoops.

Final Numbers

Today was a long day. It started off kind of fun, but well into the afternoon, my brain was starting to feel fried playing these dumb little games and regularly going back and forth between winning and losing. It was just kind of exhausting.

Let’s look at the final numbers. I made up this spreadsheet tracking my wins and losses across Word Race, Bingo, and Pool because, well, I’m a big nerd.

I played Word Race for about 2 hours, resulting in about $8 and 80 cents per hour.

I played Pool for just under an hour for a dollar loss.

I played Bingo for about 3 hours and 45 minutes and lost $50.

So either I’m just not good enough to compete for real money in these games or the way you’re matched up with other competitors is a bit unbalanced. Either way, it seems like Skillz is making stacks on stacks with this business model, and it’s clear that’s where the real money is at.

And on that note, when starting off today, I didn’t intend to play almost entirely all on the Skillz platform – this is not a sponsored video or anything – but once I had money deposited on their platform, it kind of made sense to just stick with it since they all have a familiar feel and structure and the games are honestly pretty fun.

Now in terms of actually making money – I think it’s clear from today that it’s probably a much better way of losing money. I think in order to consistently win with mobile games, you have to put in a crazy amount of hours getting good or maybe you have to find a way to cheat, but just like most of these kinds of things, I think it’s probably better to work on a side business if you’re looking to pull in some extra cash. Even just driving for Uber or Postmates would be a lot better for your bank account – but obviously not as easy as sitting on your couch with your phone.

Now I’ve got like $16 left in my account, so I’m thinking… maybe one last round of Bingo?

No, you’re addicted.

Alright, enough of that. In the future, I do want to make a video about NFT games, so if there are any ones in particular you want me to try out, drop me a comment in this video.