Mobile gamers playing Bubble Shooter, a popular game title on the Skillz esports platform Skillz

When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings acknowledged the streaming media giant's growing list of competitors in his latest annual shareholder letter, he didn't cite Disney or HBO as the biggest threats. "We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO," Hastings wrote in January. Call it the rise of the gamers. Publisher Epic Games and megastreamers like Ninja turned Fortnite into a sensation, the esports industry continues to grow, and the biggest names in tech — Apple and Alphabet among them — revealed their plans to dive deeper into gaming. Apple unveiled its new Arcade subscription gaming service and Alphabet's Google its own streaming platform for gamers called Stadia. Amid the changing gaming industry landscape, mobile gaming has taken an increasingly bigger chunk of the pie. In 2018 the mobile gaming market, which encompasses smartphones and tablets, grew to $63 billion in revenue, according to research firm Newzoo. This accounts for almost half of the global games market. Mobile gaming is getting closer to overtaking both console and PC platforms, with Newzoo estimating more than 50% market share between tablet and phone-based games in 2020 and 2021, and over $90 billion in annual revenue. Mobile esports — competitive gaming with mobile-based titles — has also become more established. Newzoo projects the global esports market will exceed $1.6 billion in revenue by 2021 and will rake in more than $1 billion in revenue this year. Esports teams are now raising their own venture capital, too, with one team worth $310 million, according to Forbes, and a total of nine esports teams worldwide worth at least $100 million.

'The most prolific media environment ever'

One of the key leaders of mobile esports growth is Skillz, which ranked No. 31 on the 2019 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. It hosts about 2 million tournaments, featuring online games of solitaire, mahjong and a number of sports-related mobile titles for amateur gamers who earn cash prizes based on their performance. Back in November, Skillz revealed that collectively, players on the platform earn, on average, over $675,000 in daily prizes. And not only are they earning more, they're playing more during a time that Skillz CEO Andrew Paradise calls "the beginning of the most prolific media environment ever."

Skillz CEO Andrew Paradise says the mobile gaming company has doubled revenue over the last five months. Skillz

"Skillz is delivering 65 minutes a day per person," Paradise told CNBC. "It's more prolific than Facebook at its peak, YouTube and Snapchat." In fact, the average Skillz user is spending more time on the platform than Netflix subscribers spend watching content, with the average subscriber for the streaming site clocking in at about 50 minutes per day. The boom in Skillz' platform, according to Paradise, is in large part due to the competitive element that results in a higher engagement number.

The so-called casual gamer is actually engaging the same way a hard-core gamer would. Andrew Paradise Skillz CEO

Paradise believes that the increasing focus on mobile is blurring the line between casual and so-called "hardcore" gamers. "The casual gamer is becoming a hardcore or mid-core gamer, and it's reflective of this evolution in media usage," said Paradise, who specifies that a Skillz user in the past would spend an average of about 30 minutes a day on the platform. Many of those users are women — seven of the top 10 earners on Skillz last year were female players, a group that took home $8 million in prize money. According to a study released by Newzoo earlier this year, 46% of all gamers are female and it is a market that may include more than 1 billion women around the world.