Kill or be Killed, Make or Lose Money: Kwari’s Al King Speaks on this Unique Premise
By Louis Bedigian

“You make money in real-time by successfully scoring hits on each other.”

In the not-too-distant future, when resources are scarce and the climate has collapsed, the gap between the poor and the wealthy will be more relevant and prevalent than ever before. Those with money will flee to space stations, leaving Earth behind to rot. Over time, a new underground sport is formed as a way to make money. That sport emerges into the mainstream arena as a test of athletic competence in a deadly environment.

That’s the story behind Kwari, a free first-person shooter. You can have the game, gain access to arenas, and compete in basic matches without spending a dime. The catch is that you won’t survive without bullets, which are sold in chunks before the game begins.

But that’s not the purpose of this shooter. Kwari was created to facilitate online competitions where bragging rights aren’t your number-one concern. In this game, you put real dollars on the line, earning money with every successful hit against an opponent. The opposite is also true, plus the penalty of losing money for every hit received.

Kwari launched this month across several European nations. The game is expected to come stateside within the first half of the year. In the meantime, we spoke to Al King (Global Marketing Director) on what we can expect from its worldwide debut.

Before we get into the pricing model, let’s talk about the game itself. One of the things being touted is that Kwari is a skill-based shooter. What makes this a skill-based game as compared to other first-person shooters?

Al King: The reason we chose a skill-based theme is not so much to position it away from other first-person shooters but to set it apart from other games online where you make money. I would say that other first-person shooters that we’re fans of in the office are equally skill-based. Our main difference with that is you make money in real-time [in Kwari]. That’s the reason we emphasized the skill-based.

Now let’s talk about the pricing plan. The game is going to be distributed for free but there are no bullets, you have to pay for those. How does that work?

AK: You’ll download Kwari onto your PC for free and have the full game world, be able to run around in it, but you won’t have any ammunition. Ammunition is essential to playing the game, so you’ll need to buy some. We haven’t completely decided the pricing point* [for the US market], but we think it’s going to be about $5 for 5,000 rounds. That is the one and only way which Kwari makes its money – the sale of ammunition.

*Editor’s Note: in the European version, one Kwari dollar is equal to one US dollar.

But with how much you shoot… I don’t know, maybe other players don’t shoot as much as me. But for those who are constantly pulling the trigger, that five dollars is going to add up quick. Won’t it be kind of like what we had with an arcade – you think, “Oh, I can go spend $5.” Before you know it, much more than that is being unloaded into the machine. How do you think gamers will deal with that? That was the thing with arcades. I know the PC game model is doing better. But a lot of time gamers say, “I’m sick of this, I just lost another game, I don’t want to keep pouring money into it.”

AK: Yeah. That’s what we’ve wrestled with. In our initial search, when we sort of came up with our $5 [pricing plan], we looked into the average number of bullets fired across a number of shooters. People shoot between 7,000 and 9,000 shots an hour, on average. In our research people haven’t found the [pricing plan] to be extortion or in any way scary.

The core difference with Kwari is that once you’re in the game there are chances to win money. One of them is the core mechanic of having set up your account with us. You make money in real-time by successfully scoring hits on each other. That leads to opportunities to offset the cost of ammunition. There will also be daily, weekly and monthly jackpots of much bigger sums. When you factor those two elements in, you get a complete picture of how Kwari works.

How much do you make when you kill an opponent? Have you settled on a rewards model?

AK: Absolutely. We are marketing Kwari with the cash for kills proposition. Technically, what Kwari is, is cash per hit. We don’t pay you on a per kill basis, we pay you on a per hit basis. The player chooses the stake level of the value per hit at which he or she is going to play. At the bottom end you’ve got one center per hit. At the top end, which we’re sort of beginning to call the high-roller, then it’s $1 per hit. This lets you control the amount of money you’re willing to risk, let’s say. But you can also have a very white-knuckle, sweaty-palms experience by jacking it up to $1.

So to make a dollar you have to be willing to risk a dollar? To lower your risk you must also lower the amount you can win?

AK: Let’s say you’ve chosen a one-cent game. That means that every shot that you fire that hits other players earns you one cent. Equally, if you get hit by somebody else, you lose one cent to the other person. And it’s always one cent because you chose to risk one cent, and everyone else in that game [is risking the same amount].

What happens when you run out of money? Suppose I only want to have $20 in my account. I decide to play $1 games and I get hit 20 times. Am I done? Am I kicked out?

AK: You’ve got your in-game balance and then you’ve got an out-of-game account balance. Let’s say you’ve put a lot of dollars into your account balance, but you only put $20 into a particular game, if you get hit 20 dollars in a $1 game, you can choose to transfer additional money from your account balance into your game balance. So as long as you’ve got money in your account balance you can stay alive.

What’s this about a map cycle? Can you choose which maps you want to play?

AK: No. That’s random. The only choice you make is the stake level. Player matching based on skill is done automatically. You’ll wait a few seconds, depending on the number of users at anyone time, and then you’ll drop into the first available game that’s at your own skill level and at your own stake level. The map you start out in will be random, but over the course of the game it will scroll through all the maps.

Since you’re buying one kind of bullet, does that mean the same bullets can be used with more than one type of weapon?

AK: You can play the game perfectly well using the default weapon. But we give players the chance to upgrade at a small cost to bigger and better weapons. Those weapons use bullets at the same rate [your stake level], but the damage that they do is increased.

Can you tell us about the characters? I would assume most of them look alike but that there is some form of customization?

AK: One of the things in Kwari with money being involved is that you have complete anonymity in the game. You don’t know how you look, and the way you look changes from game to game. The way we do that is having a range of character designs. We’ve got like a random character generation technology that creates a new character for you every time you spawn from game to game. Most of them look fairly tough and athletic.

Are there any defining elements? How can I choose to play against a specific user?

AK: You will never be able to choose to play against somebody specific [to retain anonymity].

Interesting. Now gamers will have to train themselves to brag silently.

Thank you for your time.

del.icio.us | Digg This | Glink It

---