How Playstudios combines Vegas casinos, games and player rewards | Mickey Sonnino

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
February 27, 2023
Updated June 18, 2025
10 min

A decade ago, social casino games exploded as free-to-play social casino games, where you could buy virtual chips but couldn’t cash out winnings. But Playstudios showed up in 2011 with a different kind of business model, where players earned loyalty points in the social casino games that could be redeemed for real-life rewards from a variety of hotel, entertainment and leisure brands.

The social mobile games worked out so well that the company grew to 10 studios and 750 people. CEO Andrew Pascal was able to take the Las Vegas company public at a valuation of $1.1 billion in early 2021. Since that time, the company’s value has dipped during the downturn, but it’s still valued at $502 million.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.