Who doesn’t want to get paid for playing video games? This series follows mobile applications, some of which are borderline games at best, that claim to reward users with cold hard cash (or gift cards). In my pursuit of extra cash to blow on games, or Steam gift cards to add to my collection, I have tried a number of these applications. I hope my experiences can help others steer clear of the more dubious of these applications.
To kick off this series, I will be taking a look at Lucky Day by Lucky Day Entertainment, Inc in 2015. This is primarily a scratch ticket style app, where you get virtual scratch off cards throughout the day. You can (supposedly) win cash or tokens, which can be traded in for gift cards or other items. Users can also play blackjack, where you can bet your tokens to try to win more.
They also have a daily lottery where matching numbers can, again, win tokens or cash (if you match four or more numbers, which are poor odds at best). Finally, there is a series of daily, weekly, and monthly raffles for cash prizes. You get free daily entries into these raffles and can buy more with tokens.
The application is free and supported by advertising. When getting free entries in raffles or every few scratch tickets it plays 30+ second advertisements. These ads typically have skip disabled so you are forced to watch them. It also has notifications that cannot be disabled inside the app itself. These also seem to be oddly misleading, promising things like the first 500 people to click on the notification win a mystery prize… I have never seen any proof of such a prize existing.
So, the big question with these apps is can you actually get rewards? In my opinion, no, this application is not worth your time. Over the course of about two years I have never been able to cash out money, though I did manage to get a couple of gift cards.
A major complaint that seems to come up often in negative reviews on the Google Play store is that, when you first start playing, you will occasionally win a small cash prize. However, there is a $10 minimum to cash out. And, winning cash prizes becomes less and less frequent until it stops at $9.75.
Users used to be able to exchange tokens for gift cards somewhat reliably. However, another common complaint over the last several months is that gift cards are almost always out of stock. As Steam gift cards are no longer on the app, probably the most coveted ones are now the Amazon gift cards. I have enough tokens for two $15 ones, but have not seen any in stock in quite some time.
At the time of this writing, the application has a 4.4/5 starts on the Google Play Store with people typically either giving it 5 or 1 star. Odds of winning are also linked from the publisher’s site.
The application itself is put together fairly well. It has had a few visual overhauls over the years and the design looks very professional. The app has no sounds of note, outside of ads. I personally usually leave the sound off on my phone, so I don’t count this as a negative.
Occasional bugs have come up, such as the application freezing if it tries to load an advertisement and one is not available. There was also a period when, if you quickly scratched a ticket, you could complete it before an ad would be able to load, effectively skipping watching any of them. However, they fixed that bug some time ago.
From my experience with the application, in its current form I would give it a “D-” or 2/10 stars. You are very unlikely to make any money from this app and need to spend a lot of time watching ads. At best you have a very slim chance of getting a gift card, but only after spending months collecting tokens and then getting lucky enough to find one you want in stock.