Can Mobile Games Really Pay You? A Look at Reward Apps, Skill Games, and Lotteries

Think playing solitaire can pay the rent? We take a look at the booming world of “get-paid-to-play” mobile apps—reward platforms, “skill-based” tournaments, and lottery-style games—and ask the only question that matters: how much can you actually earn? Drew and Jeff share firsthand experiences; unpack how early milestones hook you with small wins; and explain why minimum cashouts, token expirations, and transfer fees quietly shrink your payout.

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Credits:
An AmeriServ Financial, Inc. Production 
Music by SchneckMind
Hosted by Drew Thomas and Jeffrey Matevish

Thanks for listening! You can find out more about AmeriServ by visiting ameriserv.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

DISCLAIMER
This podcast focuses on having valuable conversations on various topics related to banking and financial health. The podcast is grounded in having open conversations with professionals and experts, with the goal of helping to take some of the mystery out of financial and related topics; as learning about financial products and services can help you make more informed financial decisions. Please keep in mind that the information contained within this podcast, and any resources available for download from our website or other resources relating to Bank Chats is not intended, and should not be understood or interpreted to be, financial advice. The hosts, guests, and production staff of Bank Chats expressly recommend that you seek advice from a trusted financial professional before making financial decisions. The hosts of Bank Chats are not attorneys, accountants, or financial advisors, and the program is simply intended as one source of information. The podcast is not a substitute for a financial professional who is aware of the facts and circumstances of your individual situation. AmeriServ Presents: Bank Chats is produced and distributed by AmeriServ Financial, Incorporated.

Chapters

• 0:00 From Snake to “Get Paid to Play”
• 1:00 Setting Today’s Goal: Do Gaming Apps Pay?
• 2:37 Three Categories: Rewards, Skill, Lottery
• 3:25 Task Apps: Surveys, Testing, Tiny Payouts
• 4:38 Misleading Ads and Mini-Game Bait
• 6:06 Skill-Based Games or Rigged Odds?
• 8:45 State Lotteries on Your Phone
• 9:50 The Illusion of Control in “Skill”
• 11:55 Health Gamification: Steps, Tokens, Reality
• 14:20 The Math: Averages, Minimum Cashouts, Fees
• 16:00 Better Alternatives and Future Topics
• 24:29 Wrap Up
• 25:40 Disclaimer

Transcript

Drew Thomas: 0:19

All right, so let me ask you this, what was the first mobile app game? The first mobile, yeah, trivia time. We're going to start with, oh, what was the first mobile app game?

Jeff Matevish: 0:30

Mobile Tetris?

Drew Thomas: 0:35

That's a good guess, but no, no. Tetris was pretty early. But no, the first mobile app game was actually snake.

Jeff Matevish: 0:42

Snake, oh, okay, on a Nokia or something, okay.

Drew Thomas: 0:45

Yeah, snake that would go around and he had to chase the dot or whatever that was. That's widely considered to be the first mobile app, game. And now we're done. No, the reason that I, the reason that I asked the question is because today we're going to talk about gaming apps. Okay. And I thought that we could talk about this because there are so many gaming apps on your, I mean, ever, I shouldn't say everybody, 9 out of 10 people have a smartphone at this, at this stage of the game. If you're over the age of 8 or under the age of 90, you probably have a smartphone, and there are a lot of games out there that people play that claim to pay you to play their game.

Jeff Matevish: 1:32

Yeah, yeah, I've seen those.

Drew Thomas: 1:33

And so I thought it would be a good conversation to have on a, on a Bank Chats podcast, okay, to talk about whether or not these things are legit, whether you can really make money, and how much money you can theoretically make potentially, and just kind of talk through whether or not these things are, generally speaking, a good idea or not.

Jeff Matevish: 1:55

Drew's gonna tell me if I'm gonna be able to quit my job or not.

Drew Thomas: 1:59

You will not. Foreshadowing. Spoiler alert, you're now Okay, okay, because I'm not going to tell you about the ones that would let you.

Jeff Matevish: 2:08

Oh, okay.

Drew Thomas: 2:11

So, yeah, so let's, so there are a couple of different, I was looking at different articles out there. There's, there's articles from NerdWallet and Financebuzz and a bunch of other MSN and a bunch of other apps. So, I'm not going to necessarily cite every source as we go through this but, but rest assured, we've actually looked up some of this data, and some of this is going to come from personal experience. Yeah, I would, you know, I would argue too, because I've definitely dabbled in some of this stuff.

Jeff Matevish: 2:36

So have I, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 2:38

So, the three categories that sort of keep coming up that whenever I, I try to quantify these, these, you know, apps that make you money, right, are going to be your reward apps, okay, that pay you for either task work or to play something or typing, watch an ad, yeah, things like that. Okay, the second category are your quote, unquote, skill-based games with tournaments and things like your bingos and your card games and things like that. And then the third is just straight up lottery and raffle games and, and, you know, the fact that they could potentially pay you to, to win. Okay, so, so what, what apps have you, have you ever used any apps like this? Yeah, I'm sure you've seen them. Yeah, yeah. And you kind of get frustrated then a

Jeff Matevish: 3:25

Yeah, yeah. I've used category A your, your apps that require you to do specific tasks. Okay, though I'm not going to endorse any particular one, fair enough, because I didn't get paid very much. So, the one that I used, yeah, you could either do surveys or test games. And I didn't do the surveys because I didn't want to share a lot of information with whoever created this yeah app. So, I did some game testing the, and they would pay, you know, you know, a couple pennies to a couple of dollars even, yeah, but it was one of those where they get you up front where, like, you know, if you're playing a game and you hit the first three milestones, you may have made $5 but to get to that next milestone, it might have little bit too. taken you a week to get to. Yeah, you lose interest. Yeah, right, right, you know. And a lot of these, yeah, you are watching ads to get paid, you know. And you're watching the same ad over and over and over and over again, you know, yeah. And most of the time, it's for another game that is on that list of games for you to test, you know, right? That, right, you know, it's a gamble, you know, type game, and, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 4:42

Yeah, there's, there's definitely ones out there. And, you know, there's, now it's gotten to the point where some of these advertisements for different games within games have gotten so misleading that it's unreal, to the point where they're now running ads that say, have you seen the, the ad for the game that looks like it does this, but it doesn't actually do that, but our game does? Oh, have you seen that? So, there's, there's one out there that it shows up a lot. There's a, there's a, usually a little, you know, avatar person that's running down a racetrack. And on the one side to like, it says like plus 12, and the other one says like, times 5, okay. And you have to try to figure out, like, which one is better to multiply your guys, yeah. And, you know, like, you're, you know, fighting off things that are coming the other direction, yeah, yeah. And so many of those games, like, that's like a little mini game that appears, like, once every 100 days within the larger game that has nothing to do with it whatsoever. And so they'll, they'll, they've now been advertising these like, hey, you know the game that you thought you were downloading that did this? Now it's, it's crazy how this stuff.

Jeff Matevish: 5:46

I just don't understand the advertising, I

Drew Thomas: 5:48

Yeah, it's too bad we're not in marketing, we can guess. figure that out.

Jeff Matevish: 5:51

It's bad market. Yeah, I guess, I guess.

Drew Thomas: 6:02

So, yeah.

Jeff Matevish: 6:04

So, what about you?

Drew Thomas: 6:05

So, so I have, I have played around, like you, with some of the tasking sort of stuff. So, there's, there was one that I was, that I checked out a while back that had you watch, like, movie trailers, okay. And you, you know, because I love movies, I'm a big movie buff, and so I thought, oh, this would be great. I get to see what's coming out and all this stuff. But in reality, a lot of it were movie trailers for these movies that you would never realistically see. They were, they were movie trailers for movies that appeared on the EE list of Netflix that is basically there so that Netflix can say they have a certain number of movies on file, okay? And sometimes they were different variations of the same movie. So, I think they were sort of doing A/B testing. Oh, yeah, you know which trailer...

Jeff Matevish: 6:57

Which ad Do you prefer?

Drew Thomas: 6:58

Yeah, yeah, do you prefer this one or that one? But like you, it became very tedious. It became very monotonous. And in reality, you know, when you start doing the math, you start realizing that I'd have to watch, you know, 500 of these things to earn $5, you know what I mean? Because it was just such a small amount of money that you were technically earning, right, per watch, right, right, that it just, it just wasn't realistically, you know, feasible for you to actually make money at it, yeah, right. There are things out there, like, like TaskRabbit and things like that, where there are apps, where people will put out things, where they'll say, hey, I have some odd jobs that I need done, or I need you to run to the store, or I need this or that. But that's more, I don't know that I would put that in the same category as what we're talking about here, in terms of apps. Like, these are, these are the apps that sort of make you feel like, hey, you can just sit on the couch and do nothing, but what you are already doing playing games, but make money instead. And I think it's kind of what we're focused on today. And that's, that's and like you said, like some of it is just watching ads and taking surveys, taking, you know, taking surveys is another one that, you know, you can take a survey and ask, they'll ask a question about a product or service or something.

Jeff Matevish: 8:17

or not necessarily personal information, but information that you wouldn't, you know, tell people, yeah. A lot of it during political times, it's a lot of it is political.

Drew Thomas: 8:30

Oh yeah, 100%, right. And you know, nothing, look nothing's free. I mean, at the end of the day, nothing's free. If you, you know, you think you're making free money playing a game somehow, some way, the person that's putting out that game is making more money than you, a lot more money than you. They're giving you a tiny, tiny little cut of whatever it is that they're, they're actually making on that endeavor is, you know, is what I would say. So, if we talk about some of these skill-based games, one of the ones that kept coming up that, and I in the different, the different articles I was looking at were like these, like bingo cash games, or like solitaire games, things like that. I've seen that one, you know, and you know full disclosure, you know, from everything that I've read, it's not so much that they're a scam, that you can make money doing it. It's, it's, it's, it's definitely something that is, in the strictest of terms, legitimate. But again, if you think you're going to quit your job and play solitaire for a living. It's, it's not likely to, it's not going to happen.

Jeff Matevish: 9:42

Well, that and it's a gamble. You are paying, usually, to play this. Sure. And you could lose more than you make. Yeah. So, it is gambling. In the simplest sense, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 9:53

I mean, for the ones that actually ask you, so there are definitely apps out there that will give you sort of a, you can play the free side, or you can play the pay side right. And on the free side, you know, I have found in my experience with these things, either through my own experience or talking to friends that have tried these things out, that the free side, you're really a lot better at that game. Yeah, I would imagine, than you are on the pay side and, and some of that, you have to wonder how much of that is programmed into the software, I'm sure. And...

Jeff Matevish: 10:27

Build, build your confidence until, you know, you get to that level where you think that, oh, I can pay the, play the paid game.

Drew Thomas: 10:33

Yeah, yeah. But didn't you say you, you came across a YouTuber that talked about that a little bit in, I don't think it was in...

Jeff Matevish: 10:40

It wasn't an app-based thing, but, yeah, it was, it was a game, you know, it was a claw machine, or not a claw machine, but it was like, they called it stacker.

Drew Thomas: 10:50

Like, an arcade, arcade game.

Jeff Matevish: 10:51

Yeah, it was, it was. So, the premise of this game was, you had to stack digital blocks. Okay, you had to stack them, it was like, two blocks, two blocks, two blocks, the whole way up. And you had to get to a certain level. And once you hit that level, then you won the, won the big prize. You could stop at a lower level and get a smaller prize, or keep going to get the bigger prize. And this...

Drew Thomas: 11:14

Which is Price is Right, right? It's like, it's like, you can take the $10,000 now, or you can take the 1 in 100 chance that it might actually get to $10,000.

Jeff Matevish: 11:21

But the prizes were like, extreme differences, at Yeah. like you could get a bag of candy, or you can get an iPad. Okay, yeah, okay. So, most people would, would, you know, keep playing for that dollar, you know, a dollar investment for an iPad? Okay, I'll keep going, sure. But so, this YouTuber had this, this game in his business, and no one was winning. He couldn't win. Everybody was winning the candy, but no one was winning the one was winning the bigger prizes. And for him, that was bad business. So, he called the manufacturer, whoever put this game in his business, and the guy's like, well, yeah, because that's programmed like that, you know, it's an 80/20 so 80% of the time you're going to lose, 20% of the time you're going to win. It doesn't matter if you get it perfectly centered, that block, yeah, at that level, to win that big prize, programmatically, it will move that block, and you will lose 80% of the time. So, I mean, yeah, you can.

Drew Thomas: 12:28

Yeah. I can tell you like we, we live in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania has a lottery, right? And they actually have a, an app where you can download and play the Pennsylvania lottery on your phone. Yep, you can either buy tickets to the drawings, or you can pay little, you can play the little mini games and stuff again and again, you know, totally legitimate. I mean, it's sponsored by the state, right or the Commonwealth, if you want to put it, but it, but realistically, like you said, like is, is how much of it is skill and how much of it is luck? And you do have to question that sometimes, right? You know, even the games that appear to be skill based, you don't know what the software is doing behind the scenes to make sure that you know when you're playing that, that, that, that solitaire cash game, you know that we talked about. You know, how it's you know chances are when it, when it shuffles the cards and puts them in the deck, or whatever, it already knows at that point whether or not you, you have any statistical chance of winning or not. Oh yeah. So, you have the, you have the feeling of having control, when, in reality, a lot of times you may not. Oh yeah. Again, not to say that you never can win. You know, I'm not trying to disparage any of these apps that are legitimate, because they technically are, but I think that what we're trying to convey here is that, you know, they sort of sell this idea that you can have a side hustle where you're going to

Jeff Matevish: 14:10

That's what the advertisement, I mean, the advertising is really good at that. Yeah, it makes you very earn $500 or $1,000 a month, or something like that, and then confident that you're going to be able to quit your job and you'll play these games. play solitaire for eight hours a day. Yeah, it's not a reality.

Drew Thomas: 14:20

Yeah. I saw an advertisement once for one of these games. And I honestly don't remember which one it was, but there was one of these games that they, the advertisement was a young woman who had, who was obviously a young mother, and was just stressed out and didn't know how she was gonna, you know, handle all the expenses that were coming along for, you know, her young child, or children, and that she discovered this game, and suddenly she was, you know, riding Easy Street, yeah, and boy, that is just, to me, I don't like that kind of advertising. I think that kind of advertising is just really playing on people's emotions and, and you, you know, to your point, unless you are incredibly skilled, if it is, let's imagine this game is 100% skill based. You have to be incredibly skilled to win, yeah.

Jeff Matevish: 15:06

But at what point is that considered false advertising too? Because there is probably that one person that was able to do that and now is no longer false advertising, so.

Drew Thomas: 15:19

Yeah, there's probably if I, if I went back and found it somewhere, it's probably on YouTube or something. There's probably some very fine print somewhere that says, not typical for the average player or something. And that probably gives them the carte blanche to do it but, I guess that's the same way that some of these, you know, outfits that advertise certain weight loss regimens, yeah, things like that that, you know, they say, you know, before and after, and at the bottom, it says, like, 1 out of 500 people actually achieve these results, right? You know, right? But I think that's, that's kind of, the point is that, you know, these, these games, are often advertised the same way as some of those weight loss products and things like that. It's sort of, it's sort of snake oil that you know it, it has the benefit of greasing the wheels. It's not useless, but it's not what it's necessarily sold to be.

Jeff Matevish: 16:12

Yeah, it draws you in until you get started playing, and then you get hooked, or, yeah, play for a little bit of time, realize that, hey, this is not going to pan out, but by that point, they've already shown you a dozen advertisements. They, I mean, they've, they've succeeded in what they're trying to do. Yeah. You know, even if you quit after a day or two, yeah, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 16:32

I will say, I will say I came across one app. And again, like you, I'm not going to name it, because I'm not, I'm not being endorsed, I'm not trying to endorse anything, right? There's one app out there that I came across that I still use occasionally. It's on my phone right now. And I was looking for a way to sort of gamify some sort of physical activity to try to, you know, lose some weight and get healthier and all that kind of stuff. And I find that gaming makes that easier for me. I would rather play tennis than go for a walk. I would rather play, you know, basketball than walk on a treadmill, right? So, I need something to sort of take your mind off and make it into a game and kind of forget you're exercising, you kind of forget you're exercising. And do you remember, do you remember Pokémon GO?

Jeff Matevish: 17:23

Oh yes!

Drew Thomas: 17:23

Okay, you lit up like a Christmas tree.

Jeff Matevish: 17:24

I love Pokémon GO, yeah, oh yeah. I was, I was in college when that first came out. And yeah, you'd go out to the center of the campus, and you'd have 100 people walking around staring at the phones like this, yeah, like this, you know.

Drew Thomas: 17:34

Yeah. But you didn't earn money at it, but it was...

Jeff Matevish: 17:37

No, but it got you like, moving around, and, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 17:40

Yeah, and you'd collect the little Pokémon and whatever, right. So, this has a certain element of that in it, in that you can find these little characters or charms or something like that if you walk around your neighborhood, and it'll give you a little digital map, and it'll show you like, okay, the next, the next one is this far away, so that motivates you to walk to the next, yeah, next thing, and you pick these things up. And it, it will also, there's a secondary component of it, where, just by walking around your average day, you know the number of steps that you attain, you can, you can earn coins, right? Okay, you can redeem those coins. Now, here's the thing about it, though, it costs nothing, to be perfectly frank, it, the reason that I still sort of look at it and play with it is that it doesn't cost anything. It's not one of

Jeff Matevish: 18:27

They didn't make their money somehow. Yeah. these ones where you have to pay to play. Yeah. There are a lot of ads to be fair, so you're sort of...

Drew Thomas: 18:38

But the other side of it is that, like some of these other games, it takes forever for you to achieve something, yeah? So, you know, I can collect 500 or 1000 of these tokens, and, you know, at that point I've earned myself a $10 gift card, right?

Jeff Matevish: 18:57

Yeah, like airplane miles, you know.

Drew Thomas: 18:59

Yeah, kind of, it kind of is, you know, and if I look at the, the redemption wheel every day, you know, yeah, you get more coins for every, for every new tier you hit in terms of steps. But I think the first tier to learn, like one token, is like 2,000 steps, which is really simple. Most people walk 2,000 steps just walking around the house every day. But to get to three tokens, you have to go all the way up to something like 8,000 steps. And then to get six tokens, you have to do 20,000 steps. So, it's not a linear thing where you're getting, oh, for every 2,000 steps, I get a token, it's, it's, it's, it's definitely made so that you have to really, really excel every single day in order to earn anything that's, that's useful. And again, you know, you're still only earning maybe a maximum of 10 tokens a day, even if you were to walk 30,000 steps, and it takes you hundreds of these things to earn a $5 or $10 reward. So, I think, I think, really, what we're, you know what, what I wanted to impress upon people with these things, you know, is that, again, can you make money on them? Yeah, technically, you can, but it's probably not even going to be a side hustle, and it's definitely not worth quitting your job over, yeah, you know what I mean. I don't have you ever known anybody that has, that has done these things, or, like, played with these things much?

Jeff Matevish: 20:25

No, I did, when I was doing some research, and the app that I was using said that, you know, they said, as well as the article that I was reading that had nothing to do with this, this app said that you could earn $50 to $100 a month was, like, conservative. So, I mean, you can earn some money, but it also didn't say how long you were spending playing these games or taking these surveys or doing, doing whatever, you know, yeah? So, like, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 20:56

Yeah, what's your, what's your per hour?

Jeff Matevish: 20:57

Yeah, yeah. Are you doing this for eight hours a day, and you're making $50 you know, a month? That's not, you know, something I want to do.

Drew Thomas: 21:05

Yeah no, there are definitely better jobs out there that pay a better hourly rate, right? The other thing that you have to keep in mind with these things, and this is true of a lot of different, different things, where people sell you on certain things, you know, the some of these, to your point, with some of these apps, will say, like, oh, you can earn so much per month, right? Right. Or the average user, or users can earn, I shouldn't say average user, but like, the users have earned up to $10 a month, or something like that, whatever it is. But you have to also think about the fact that that's, that calculation is being done by taking 3 million users, right? And if the top 10 out of that 3 million earn a ridiculous amount, that skews it, right? Right. It's going to skew it for the whole, the whole thing. So, you can say the average user earns $10 a month, but that's only an average if you account for the fact that the top 10 people earned a million dollars, and the other 2,999,990 earned nothing, right, right?

Jeff Matevish: 22:12

Well, and you have to, you have to think about it too, a lot of these apps and websites, they have a really high minimum cash out balance too. So, yeah, you may not be being paid monthly, either. You, I mean, some of these apps may be, you know, $50 or $100 that you have to have a minimum on in your, you know, on your account, your balance before you can even cash that out for a gift card, or, you know, dump that into your bank account, or whatever it is, yeah, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 22:40

And then also keep in mind too, too, I mean, again, you know, even if it is a legitimate thing, you know, read the fine print. Sometimes the fine print will tell you that you can, like you said, only cash out at a certain, at a certain level. Some will tell you that there are transfer fees. So, if you want to transfer the money out of that app and into an actual bank account where you could spend it as money, there's a percentage that gets withheld because of the transfer fee, or something along those lines.

Jeff Matevish: 23:08

Or you may, you may, you know, a gift card, if you get a gift card, it may be, you know, for the, the face value of whatever you earn, but dumping into a bank account, and they're gonna take that, what you said, that fee, they're gonna hold it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 23:20

So, keep in mind that kind of stuff too, that even if you do earn a certain amount the other, the other thing to keep in mind is some of these apps will pay you in tokens, like the one that I told you about, like I'm earning tokens, right? I have to redeem the tokens for cash. But make sure that if you're using one of these apps that pays you in tokens, that those tokens don't expire.

Jeff Matevish: 23:42

Oh, that's a good one, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 23:44

Because if you don't use them in a certain amount of time, you lose them. Because that's another thing you got to be aware of. You know, they can, they can play with those tokens a lot in terms of making sure that you only get, they only really have to pay you so much. There's, don't kid yourself into believing that they don't have an algorithm and haven't done the math on their side to know how much they can pay out in money and still make a profit.

Drew and Jeff: 24:09

Yeah, they need to win, right? Yeah, they're gonna win, just like it, like you said, just like any, any game, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're gonna win. You know, yeah, you can go to the casino, and you can win money, but I guarantee the casinos winning more. Yep, the house always wins. Yeah, so and these are, in some ways, kind of like that, in some cases, you know, yeah.

Drew Thomas: 24:29

All right. So, again, just, you know, be aware. You know, when you're doing these kinds of things, I think that's, you know, what we're trying to do is just educate on financial things like, you know, if you're, to your point, investing eight hours a day to earn $50 a month, maybe earn, go pick up a part time job delivering pizzas or something, you're probably still going to make out better. Yeah, hopefully, or tips or something. We could

Jeff Matevish: 24:54

Yeah, you'll make minimum wage at least, yeah. honestly, we could probably have a conversation about those kinds of jobs too, things like Ubers and things like that, put it on the list. We'll put it on the list of things to talk about, because a lot of those kinds of gigs are, in fact, gigs. There's sort of a gig economy. You're an independent contractor, which means you don't get paid a minimum wage, and you have to do all of your own taxes and stuff. So, we'll put that on the table to talk about those kinds of jobs too, at some point. I think that that's definitely worth it, yeah, definitely. So, in the meantime, go play some games, yeah, but play them free. Play

Drew and Jeff: 25:18

We'll see you, Drew. Yep. the free ones, you know. Yeah, all right, take care.

Jeff Matevish: 25:40

This podcast focuses on having valuable conversations on various topics related to banking and financial health. The podcast is grounded in having open conversations with professionals and experts with the goal of helping to take some of the mystery out of financial and related topics as learning about financial products and services can help you make more informed financial decisions. Please keep in mind that the information contained within this podcast and any resources available for download from our website or other resources relating to Bank Chats is not intended and should not be understood or interpreted to be financial advice. The hosts, guests, and production staff of Bank Chats expressly recommend that you seek advice from a trusted financial professional before making financial decisions. The hosts of Bank Chats are not attorneys, accountants, or financial advisors, and the program is simply intended as one source of information. The podcast is not a substitute for a financial professional who is aware of the facts and circumstances of your individual situation. Thank you for listening. Please check out our full library of episodes, which can be found on the ameriserv.com website. You can also download or stream the podcast from your favorite podcast app.