Exclusive: Players’ Lounge crosses $150M in skill-based wagers
Exclusive: Players’ Lounge crosses $150M in skill-based wagers
Sharpr is a weekly newsletter covering the intersection of esports and betting
Hi everyone, Cody here.
This week I talked to Zach Dixon, the co-founder of Players’ Lounge, the skill-based betting platform backed by the likes of Drake, Comcast, and more, about crossing the $150M mark in betting handle.
While the nine-figure milestone is something Dixon says the company is proud of, he and his team are already headstrong on what they believe is the next evolution of Players’ Lounge: player-vs-house.
Also just a heads up to everyone that we won’t be publishing a story next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday 🦃
In this week’s edition of Sharpr…
Players’ Lounge crosses $150M in skill-based wagers.
Rivalry unveils Casino.exe, a new 90’s-branded casino platform.
The Counter-Strike IEM Rio Major peaked at 1.42M concurrent viewers.
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Players’ Lounge crosses $150M in skill-based wagers, shifts focus to players-vs-house
Skill-based betting platform Players’ Lounge has crossed $150M in peer-to-peer wagers processed on the site, the company’s co-founder Zach Dixon told Sharpr.
“It sounds like a ton of money,” Dixon laughed when describing the significance of the milestone. “It’s something to celebrate, it’s something we’re very proud of.”
Players’ Lounge launched its platform in 2016, allowing users to bet cash against each other in games like FIFA, Madden NFL, NBA 2K, Fortnite, and Call of Duty.
Customers who come out on top of the match keep 90% of the winnings, while Players’ Lounge takes in a 10% rake.
Players’ Lounge recently snared $10.5M in a Series A funding round in August.
The company’s impressive list of investors include Drake, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, Comcast, Samsung, and former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.
Dixon says the success of Players’ Lounge is rooted in building a brand that people trust and creating a positive atmosphere around friendly competition, which he notes can be daunting online, especially when real money is on the line.
“We’ve successfully created a platform where we can bring strangers together to play each other in a fun and friendly atmosphere,” Dixon said. “[We] bring down the barrier of fear of competing against a stranger, because it’s a tense thing to do, especially online. We wanted to create the most friendly experience we could that was fast, slick, fun, and safe.”
While the $150M landmark isn’t anything to sneeze at, Players’ Lounge has already been executing what Dixon and his team anticipate is the next big evolution of the company for several months: player-vs-house.
Launched in September, the company’s player-vs-house product lets users bet against themselves via its mobile app. Players can input their account information and are offered an array of “challenges” they can bet on, using historical account data to determine a user’s skill and generating fixed-odds lines.
“This is just you playing against your own handicap, so it’s significantly more efficient as a business, and it’s really fun,” Dixon added. “That’s what we’re all in on.”
Currently, the product is only available for Call of Duty: Warzone, and allows users to place wagers on several markets, including the amount of kills, damage, and placement reached during a single match. Dixon says that offering will soon expand to include Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer and Warzone 2 in the coming months, with ambitions to have up to 10 featured games by the end of 2023. This expansion also includes adding additional markets (based on available game data) and even parlays.
”It’s almost like a sportsbook where there’s a million prop bets, and the more data we have, the more data that’s out there, the greater our offering can be.”
Dixon says the company has blown past its initial KPIs since debuting the product just a few months ago, with expectations to match the $150M handle from its peer-to-peer offering “in a few years time.”
Currently, players are capped at a max bet of $55 USD per match, an increase from what was offered when the product initially launched, and a change that Dixon noted drove a sharp increase in traffic. He says the company plans to incrementally raise the wager limit into the hundreds and thousands in the next 6 to 12 months, and expects that it will fuel increased betting volume and player activity.
🦈 Sharpr Take: While the new spin on Players’ Lounge is an interesting endeavor clearly yielding results for the company, it’s not the first time we’ve seen this product explored in esports.
In 2018, the now Entain-owned Unikrn unveiled UMode, a player-vs-house product where users could similarly bet on themselves in an array of games, including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, PUBG, League of Legends, Halo 5, and more. The Unikrn platform has been offline for roughly a year now since selling to Entain, and while it’s supposedly undergoing renovations to relaunch later this year, it was never clear how this product actually performed.
I asked Dixon if–several years later–this was the right time for this idea to take off and why, and he admitted that executing this specific model is not an easy task.
“It’s very hard to predict accurately how [a user] is going to do in his next game of Call of Duty. It’s a very difficult mathematical problem to solve,” he said. “There’s the marketing side of the business, there’s brand loyalty and affinity, and do players’ trust this company? Those are all pretty difficult nuts to crack.”
Perhaps now in Players’ Lounge favor is gaming’s pervasive nature online, and generally in the broader cultural mainstream, which have accelerated at an impressive pace in the last three years.
Dixon noted that the company has spent very little on marketing its new product, and that its virality of users winning sizable cash prizes on the platform is paying dividends through word of mouth.
“As we’re shipping product features to the app, we’re seeing the viral coefficient go up in a pretty steady way,” he said. “I think that’s going to play a huge role in its success.”
🗞 In the news
Rivalry unveiled Casino.exe, a new 90’s-branded casino platform (Disclaimer: I am a full-time employee of Rivalry).
Sports Information Services will power Spreadex with 24/7 esports content.
Esports Entertainment Group brands SportNation and RedZone will cease trading in the UK by December.
📈 By the numbers
The Counter-Strike IEM Rio Major peaked at 1.42M concurrent viewers.
FanDuel accepted approximately 52,000 bets per minute during this year's Super Bowl; it accepted roughly 70,000 bets per minute during Week 9 of this year's NFL season.