‘When you land in Vegas, it feels like this’: Gambling on the future of gaming at GDC

The activation also set the tone for this year’s conference: Striking, a little manic, and palpably cash-hungry. As GDC panelists from every sector of the industry discussed how to weather AI disruption and thinning margins, “real money” games — video games that offer cash or crypto payouts to winning players — were prominent on the expo floor. Monetization is on the rise not only in mobile casino games and esports, but also across other genres, such as shooters, MMO arenas, and even AI-only battle royales. Forget playing for the joy of it. At GDC, play-to-earn was the future.

This trend in the video game industry runs parallel to a more widespread cultural shift: it’s 2026 in America, and everything is gambling. Sports betting has exploded in recent years, thanks to the rise of user-friendly apps like FanDuel and DraftKings and a 2018 Supreme Court decision that overturned a federal ban and returned legalization efforts to the states; as of this month, sports betting is legal in some form in 40 states, plus Washington, DC. Prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, which allow users to place bets on anything from the weather forecast to Anthropic’s IPO date to the war in Iran, have boomed so suddenly that regulation has struggled to catch up as rumors of insider trading abound.

Together, these industries have raked in hundreds of billions of dollars and hordes of new users of all ages and demographics, and their cultural and financial influence has ballooned so dramatically that even industries like cable news have been forced to get in on the action.

Except for prediction markets and casinos operating on tribal land, gambling is still largely illegal in California, so the real money video game companies operating here walk a fine legal line. To differentiate themselves from games of chance, many companies market their titles as “skill-based,” meaning that the winner is determined by abilities such as speed or memory.

AviaGames, a Bay Area-based mobile multiplayer casino game developer with a booth at GDC, is one of these companies.

“It’s grown dramatically over the past few years,” AviaGames CEO Vickie Chen said of the skill-based gaming market. Last year, its global valuation was about $51 billion, up 16 percent from 2024; by 2030, that figure is expected to double to a whopping $100 billion.

Chen credits this boom to greater access to as well as the growth of secure payment services built for these gaming platforms. (As if to prove this point, AviaGames was stationed at GDC in the Monetization Lounge, a new “neighborhood” added to the expo floor this year, and was surrounded by ads and booths sponsored by services promising near-instant payouts for winners.)

Chen also said AviaGames titles are less complex, less time-consuming and aimed at a less male-dominated audience than traditional e-sports. She said most of their user base is women aged 30 to 55 who play for fun. “But,” she said, “the real money part gets people more excited.”

As much as it sounds like gambling, Chen insisted it wasn’t.

“I think the user base is completely different,” Chen said of the sports betting and prediction market industries. “They’re all competing with the system, the environment, maybe the computer. But for skill-based games, the most exciting part is competing with other opponents.”

The legality and potential size of the market for skill-based games depends on the platforms that keep bots at bay. While Chen said AviaGames takes extensive measures to prevent AI cheating, there is an undeniable sloppiness to real money games. AviaGame’s website is full of AI-generated faces, and online forums often say that the entire genre is full of “scams” and “ad farms”. In 2024, Skillz, of the carnival truck, won a $43 million settlement from AviaGames after it sued the competitor for patent infringement, alleging that it used AI bots to direct the games, which Skillz CEO Andrew Paradise said in a public statement undermined consumer trust in skill-based games.

But other exhibitors at GDC see bots as a valuable asset: One South Korean company called Nexus believes AI games will be the next popular genre, where the fun comes from putting money on your favorite agents and watching them duke it out from above, like a spectator at the Roman Colosseum.

At GDC, Nexus’ head of AI and blockchain, Isaac Lee, presented an example of what this kind of game might look like. It’s called MoltyRoyale, a “Hunger Games-style” arena game he and his colleagues made after seeing the hype surrounding Moltbook, the AI-only social media that went viral earlier this year. Lee claims around 40,000 real people, mostly based in the US and the Philippines, have trained and unleashed over 7 million AI agents in the game to compete for a pot of $MOLTZ tokens. (At $7.2 million MOLTZ, the pot would currently trade for around $720 US dollars.)

“The monetization layer for players, not for companies, is going to be the next big trend,” Lee said, citing player-to-player transactions of in-game items or speculation markets on AI-only games like MoltyRoyale as two likely revenue streams.

Overall at GDC, the signals were strong: Everyone is getting pinched. Everyone is getting more desperate – hell, even GDC itself has rebranded this year as the “Festival of Games” in an attempt to attract larger audiences.

Outside the Skillz Victory Truck, Cerminara, Skillz’s contracted emcee, put it this way: “Everybody’s just looking for new ways to make money.”