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Abstract
Online social casino games, cash-incentivized skill-based games, and free-play competition games share many characteristics with gambling. Given the similarities, much research has focused on the potential harms associated with these gaming formats; however, most of the work has been correlational in nature. Previous research has shown that players tend to migrate from free versions of games to cash-incentivized competition versions, but it does not establish a causal direction. In the current work, I utilize a novel research design to investigate whether players who are assigned to a free-play gaming condition are more likely to migrate to cash-play gaming relative to a control condition. In a university sample, players who were assigned to the free-play condition were not more likely to migrate to cash-play gaming relative to those in the control or cash-play conditions. I found that perceived performance was the only variable in this study that predicted whether a player would migrate to cash gaming. Results suggest that the mechanisms by which players migrate from free-play to cash-play gaming are complex and nuanced.