consumers face more skepticism than competitor in online gaming case

Mitchell v. Skillz Platform Inc., 2026 WL 2212876, No. 26-cv-00674-AMO (N.D. Cal. Jul. 31, 2026)

Although competitors can aggregate harm to sue under the Lanham Act, consumers—the direct victims of false advertising—tend to have more trouble. Skillz just lost a big claim to its main competitor over falsely advertising that it didn’t use bots in mobile cash games. Here, with similar allegations under various state laws, the consumers struck out. Plaintiffs didn’t sufficiently allege reliance, causation, or lack of an adequate remedy at law (for the restitution claim).

Representations that users match with “real players” and have “no bots guaranteed” were plausibly false and deceptive, as were representations that users match with “players of equal skill.” But the representation that users can make “easy withdrawals” was non-actionable puffery with no set meaning.

The claims failed because plaintiffs didn’t allege that they relied on or even read any particular representation. “Most of the representations are allegedly located across Skillz’s website and social media accounts, so it is not reasonable to infer that Plaintiffs must have seen them.” Even an in-app badge displayed “in front of every single player, every time they launch a Skillz-powered application” since at least the beginning of 2024 wasn’t enough to plead that they actually read the alleged misrepresentations. Seems pretty fixable, but language quoted rejecting the RICO claim was bad news (and maybe another reason to avoid RICO claims): “[A]s the Ninth Circuit noted in a similar case, ‘there may be no single, logical explanation for gambling—it may be an addiction, a form of escape, a casual endeavor, a hobby, a risk-taking money venture, or scores of other things.’ As a result, it may well be that the representations ‘did nothing to influence [users’] perceptions’ or that users ‘played fully aware of how the [platform] operate[s].’” While the evidence in the competitor case tends to negate that idea, “users had to launch a Skillz application before seeing the in-app badge, so they might have already decided to play before seeing the representations at issue here.”