GSN Games has just launched a new gaming service focused on winning real money on iOS, called Sparcade (Free). The company has enlisted Greg Canessa, whose name you may not know but whose work you do, as he’s the creator of Xbox Live Arcade, and has done high-ranking work on Battle.net, along with work at PopCap and Activision. He’s been around, he’s worked on some major stuff, and now he’s helping to bring Sparcade to mobile. The app expands on GSN Games’ real-money games efforts that have been in place online for a long time, just bringing them in a mobile-friendly format. The app has launched with 5 different games, and has expanded to the US App Store today.

Now, while the idea behind real-money contests is not new – Skillz in particular has been in several games – Sparcade is designed to be the go-to hub for their experience. So all games, all transactions, they take place inside of the Sparcade app. The plan is for games developed by Sparcade, but still incorporating a lot of known intellectual property, to be added into the app over time. And the games are intended to be well-made versions of their franchises. Like the Pac-Man game that’s launching with Sparcade is an original creation, but takes a lot of inspiration from Pac-Man Championship Edition ($2.99) with mazes that change as you collect dots.

And that’s actually one of the interesting topics about Sparcade that I discussed recently with Canessa: how do you ensure that games with randomized elements remain games of skill? Gambling is kind of a sticky topic in gaming right now – Valve is currently in hot water over Counter-Strike skin gambling, and daily fantasy sports have started to introduce eSports products as well. If a product is seen as gambling, then it is subject to intense regulation by local governments at different levels. But products classified as games of skill are legal in many jurisdictions including most US states for players to wager money on.

So for Sparcade, they make sure their games’ random elements do not differ between players. Essentially, each game with random elements has the same generated seed for each player, so in Pac-Man, each player gets the same mazes generated each time so it’s a fair competition. Sparcade’s Tetris game gives each contestant the exact same blocks in the exact same order. So a game can contain randomized elements and test players’ reactions to happenstance, but each player in a particular contest gets the exact same randomized elements in their game. GSN Games has run real-money “games of skill" contests online for years now, so they have experience in this field – not to mention plenty of lawyers who have run through everything with a fine-tooth comb.

But Sparcade would mean nothing without actual fun games to play. Their Pac-Man game is rather slick, and it’s a cool, portrait-mode-enabled game that takes after Championship Edition, so that’s well worth checking out in and of itself. The Tetris game is pretty cool too, with easy touch controls, a cool powerup system, and slick animations all around. And because these have stringent “game of skill" regulations, they feel different from other free-to-play versions of these games, which is quite welcome. The other game syou can check out at launch are Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune, and Solitaire TriPeaks.

You can add money to your account to play in real-money contests, such as high score contests against other players with a $1 entry fee, and one player taking the pot minus Sparcade’s cut, for example. But there’s also plenty of matches you can play for just tokens, with rewards being more tokens and Sparcade rewards such as additional avatar customizations, and achievements for each game. So if you just want to play just for fun, you can, though obviously the money contests are a core part of the app.

While I’m interested to see just how Sparcade does, especially in an interesting time for video games and any connection to wagering money, Sparcade’s core app is pretty slick, and if future games can maintain the quality the initial games have, this could be a promising way for real-money contests to take root on mobile.