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Skillz Accelerate - Program Details

What is Skillz Accelerate​

Skillz Accelerate is a program that spotlights exciting new releases from the Skillz developer community. With over 40 million registered players, our Skillz community is always looking for new and exciting games to play.

From within the SDK, there are multiple entry points to games.skillz.com where users can discover new games. We have tracking on all of these entry points and can detect when a user is viewing games.skillz.com from one of these entry points. Note for example, the creative_id in the this url https://games.skillz.com/?creative_id=accelerate_referral.

For these sessions, Skillz Accelerate will display a special section that spotlights the games currently in the program. This cross promotion of existing Skillz players into Accelerate titles will help these games grow, create opportunities for valuable player feedback, and ultimately support them meeting the requirements to unlock prized tournaments.

Highly successful titles may also receive user acquisition support to further grow their audience!

If accepted into the program, your game will be featured on the Latest Games section of games.skillz.com for 20 weeks! For the first week, your game will be the first one in the list (leftmost on the scrolling display), moving down by one spot on the list for each week of the program.

How you can apply​

Skillz Accelerate is available to any Skillz game that has fully launched within the last six months, and which has never appeared in the Latest Games section of the site. This is a great opportunity for developers looking to get the users needed to get through Fairness testing, and so get to Prize Enablement, as well as for developers that drive their games to Prize Enablement during their alphas/betas to get an added boost of organic users.

To apply to the program, navigate to your game’s Overview Tab within the Skillz Developer Console and use the Accelerate widget. Please be aware that for the Accelerate widget to be available, you must have correctly configured your game by completing each of the steps in the Optimize section of the Developer Console, have an abort rate of less than 8% in the last seven days, and it must be on the most recent Stable SDK release.

Review Process​

Once applying, our team will review your application using the following criteria:

  1. Game is free of bugs, crashes, and UX errors
  2. The final score as reported in the SDK matches what is show in gameplay
  3. Players have the ability to end the game early and doing so submits a score and NOT an abort
  4. Controls are functional
  5. All on screen text is legible across multiple devices
    1. Devices tested include iPhone 6 and up, as well as the latest supported Android devices
  6. Game must be of “good” level of quality
    1. While subjective, the game must be “fun”
    2. Gameplay starts as expected
    3. Core mechanics function as intended (i.e.: if it’s an endless runner, can you actually dodge obstacles?)
  7. No explicit or off-brand content
    1. No gambling or gambling-related games
    2. All app store materials, names, and descriptions follow our game theme and marketing guidelines
      1. Make special care to follow our guidelines for Marketing and In-Game Copy
  8. Game exhibits some uniqueness of art quality and overall production value. It is more than a simple asset pack with Skillz added on.

Success Story​

Skillz Accelerate debuted in 2020 with igamebank’s® "2 Minute Football". Accelerate increased the game’s installs per day by 5x and drove enough daily active users to the game for the enablement of prized competitions and revenue generation from organic traffic.

As the game continued to grow, it also showed exceptional player retention, with Day 7 (D7) retention rates handily outperforming sports genre benchmarks. Skillz and igamebank® then launched a joint digital marketing user acquisition campaign.

Skillz is excited to share the success of 2 Minute Football and the Accelerate program with other independent developers. It’s an incredible opportunity for developers to grow their newly Skillz-enabled game into a highly successful title.

Read here for an interview with the developer of 2 Minute Football and to learn how it helped propel his game to a smash success!