About this app
About Wicked Witch
The pure-play prediction market-operators, Polymarket and Kalshi, emerged from Week 1 as the clear winners. On one hand, Kalshi’s market share lead narrowed over its competitors, falling to 82% for the week ended 13 September, down from 86% a week earlier.
Still, Kalshi had a nine-fold lead over Polymarket, its next closest rival. Polymarket, meanwhile, led the group with 762,000 app downloads, edging Kalshi, DraftKings and FanDuel in the category. The downloads represented a 13,509% weekly increase and 25% of total category downloads, Polymarket wrote in a statement.
Across the market, operators delivered high double-digit gains compared with Labor Day weekend, which featured a full slate of college football games but no NFL contests. Two operators, DraftKings and Underdog each saw triple-digit growth, delivering weekly increases of 125% and 119%, respectively. Three others, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Novig, saw gains of at least 30%, led by Polymarket with a weekly increase of 46%.
What is Wicked Witch?
The submission form will close on 1 October, at which time nominations will be put to our esteemed panel of judges for final review.
More information on judges, submissions and deadlines can be found here. You can also access interviews with last year’s winners and the final list for 2025, as well as for every year prior.
We look forward to working with our judges, and once again shining a light on some of the gaming industry’s best talents!
How to play Wicked Witch
Despite his experience launching businesses, Yashin has been surprised by the enthusiastic reception from the wider industry. Perhaps even more revealing is the feedback from the people tasked with selling the product. According to Yashin, one Swipe Games business development manager with more than 20 years’ industry experience told him he had never found a new product easier to pitch.
The response extends to potential customers. Yashin says that of around 50 leads generated through events and the company’s network, only one decided against integration, leaving Swipe Games prioritising a queue of prospective partners.
“We have a term within our team called ‘hot pie’,” Yashin says. “It is our internal term for a really hot product that is easy to sell. It is something new for the market and the market is ready.”
