Ever wanted to translate your gaming skills into dollar bills?
Now's your chance.
In the online multiplayer first-person shooter called "Kwari," players go can head-to-head to win jackpots of cash.
Launched in early January in Europe, "Kwari" is a free downloadable game -- but you have to spend money to make money. The ammo will cost you five bucks for 5,000 bullets, and that's the only cut that publisher Kwari Limited gets. The money for the jackpots is pooled together from real money spent on in-game goods -- weapons, health upgrades and self-inflicted injuries -- and it stays strictly in-game. With Visa, Mastercard and PayPal on board, "Kwari" looks to set its sights beyond Europe.
Does this sound like gambling to you?
I caught up with Kwari Limited Marketing Director Al King at GDC last month to talk about the game. King expects we'll be seeing "Kwari" in the U.S. in June, despite strict U.S. gambling laws, which vary from state to state. In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibits the transfer of funds from a financial institution to an Internet gambling site (excluding fantasy sports, online lotteries, and horse racing). Kwari Limited took great steps to not run afoul of those laws.
"After all those CEOs got arrested on the back of the poker dot-com boom and the re-legislation that the American government went through in order to make those games illegal," King said, "Our biggest challenge was making sure that we were not going to be subject to those gambling laws. And so we spent a lot of money and a lot of legal man-hours basically looking at a state-by-state basis how we would like to be interpreted. Apart from the notorious 14 states which are known to be completely intolerant of any type of gambling or skill-based gaming, we are officially not gambling. We're skill-based." At press time, Kwari Limited's publicity informed me that "Kwari" is now approved in 37 states (including the District of Columbia).
While the American version will receive some upgrades from the European one, like shortened download times and lessened spec requirements, there will be no major changes to how the game looks or plays. This is despite some less than favorable reviews of "Kwari"'s core design. "We were obviously going to be compared to first-person shooters, but we never set out to be a new benchmark in that genre in terms of the graphics or the engine," King explained of the negative reviews, particularly mentioning German outlets. "Our big achievement is the fact that we fused a gaming engine with a betting engine... And then every single event that takes place in the game is independently verified in the server before it's validated, because it's about money. That is a huge tech achievement. Now, despite all [the achievements in technology], they still basically reviewed it as a straight forward shoot-'em-up and so inevitably we've not scored brilliantly against that sort of criteria."
Despite the review scores, "Kwari" is doing rather well. While King declined to give me specifics on the number of players, he did mention that a few weeks ago, their 50 millionth bullet was sold, and the game has had over 30,000 downloads. Out of those downloads, King said that they're "well above 40% in terms of converting those downloads into actual accounts that have been paid into," and Kwari Limited expects a spike in downloads once PayPal is enacted in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, one player is raking in the dough. At the top of the leaderboards is the Dublin-based "Sinister," who's won $32,610.81 to date; the second place player behind him hovers around only $2,200. I wondered why the disparity between the players' earnings was so large. "The difference in his ability is not as big as the difference in his monetary earnings," King explained. "He's had one $20,000 jackpot and one $5,000 jackpot. So if you take that out, then that's more of an accurate reflection of his difference in ability. There's no doubt that he is very, very good. But he's only slightly better than the rest of the people at the top end of the spectrum."
King added, "[The players] don't talk about graphics or the character designs or all the things we're normative about. They purely talk about how much money they're making and the best ways to make money. ... And that's what 'Kwari' is about. Turn that skill set that you've acquired from just being a gamer into a potential way to make a living. That was always a possibility of 'Kwari' and it's already happened -- Sinister is the ultimate example of that."
Next up after America this year: the mecca of competitive gaming. "The plan is to roll out in Asia next year," King said. "The strategy for Asia is basically pick our priority territories -- I imagine Korea and Japan will be towards the top of that list and probably Taiwan and Singapore as well -- and basically work with a local partner. I'll be back at the Tokyo Game Show this year with more meetings with potential partners. I'm quite close to the guys at NCsoft in Europe, and I've had one initial conversation with them, very sort of casual, topline about a possible partnership with them. So Asia next year at some point with the right partner, but I don't know who yet."
For now though, "Kwari" will have to settle for one smaller milestone thus far. "We are going to be in the 'Guinness Book of Records' as the first online first-person shooter for cash," King said, laughing. "It's a small and modest honor, but it's a first for me in terms of my career!"
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