Startups #nofilter had the pleasure to chat with Ori Koskas, CEO & Founder of PVP Challenge. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you will very soon.
PVP Challenge is on the verge of creating an entire new industry for people to play video games against eachother and bet money at the same time.
Read what Ori has to say about his company, as well as the industry, in this exclusive interview below:
1) What was it like to get in the ring with the MMA fighter? How much money did you win from him?
Lol, that guy’s name is Rahav Meshulam and he is my kick box trainer, and because it was a commercial I wasn’t afraid and it was a good and fun experience. I am training all my life and I can tell you that if we would have fight like that in real life he would have killed me in 30 seconds.
2) Let’s start with those of us who don’t know what PVP is all about, which stands for Player vs Player. Do you have a background in PVP? Where did you get this idea from? This GeekTime article says you played a lot of video games in the army.
The history of PVPchallenge started about 7 years ago. I was just finishing the army and I started working in consulting and training counter terror units in many different countries all over the world. In many of the places there wasn’t anything to do beside watch TV and play video games. In my case I spent 99% of my free time playing Call of Duty on PS3 online against other players from all over the world. I played so much that I became good at it and I was ranked #1 in Israel and in the top 10 in Europe on the game ranking score. Then I thought to myself- “If there was a way to make the online game a lot more excited and also I will be able to make some money out of it, that could be awesome.” Back then it was too early to carry out such a good idea because of many different reasons and I will explain more in the following questions.
3) How does the technology work? Let’s say I want to play someone in FIFA 2016 over PC – does each user have to own a copy of the game on our PCs, and then we synch up?
PVPchallenge is built as a social network that each player has his own profile with his games history, wall of comments that other player can write their opinion on the user, and a reliability ranking system. PVP gives users the option to find other gamers to play against, and a safe way to conduct a money transaction based on who won. We also have a reliable dispute team that reviews any games that are the subject of a dispute. The game itself doesn’t happen on our platform. The players need to meet online through there own consoles and come back to our platform to report the results. If the reported results do not match, a dispute is opened and both players are requested to send proof of the game.
Today PS4 and XBOX ONE record everything and users can simply send us the full recording of their game from the moment they meet until the results of the game are shown and that is the perfect proof. Our team will then review this recording and determine who won. If we can’t determine, then both sides will get their money back. However if we find that somebody reported false results, his reliability ranking will go down or he may even be blocked from the platform.
4) Your site says you are a social network. Does each user get their own social profile? And do they get points and badges?
As I said in my last answer, yes. each player has his own profile with his games history, wall of comments that other player can write their opinion on the user, and a reliability ranking system. In the future the will be a lot more features that will improve the social experience.
5) It would be great if I could watch 2 other users play against each other – is this feature available?
We have a lot of things we would like to do at PVPchallenge, some in the near future and some are more long term. Right now we are working on improving our user experience and the social experience. We are also building our app and developing a few more features. Live streaming is something we want to add 100% in the future but not right now. As I said before, we have a lot of goals that we want to achieve and the users will dictate the pace and what to focus on.
6) Right now you have PC, Xbox, and PS4. Any other consoles to be added? What about some old school consoles, like N64 or Sega Genesis?
Right now those are the only console because they have the best ability to generate proof of game and wining for us to solve disputes if needed. We do have a few surprises in the future about the consoles and games options, but unfortunately I can not share it with the public at this time.
7) Are there any legal issues with your site? Because it is essentially gambling, it is allowed in every country?
The subject of legality was our biggest obstacle. First of all its not gambling at all, its a skill games. But it was our biggest obstacle because even that Skill game platform is legal we needed to find a credit card company and a big bank that will approve us and we did, our credit card company is SafeCharge and the bank is BORGUN (German bank). We are legal to work almost on all over the world beside countries like Iran, Syria, North Korea and in the USA some states(8) that not allowing any kind of skill game platform.
Just in case we got a federal legal opinion the says unequivocally which state we can work with and with who we can’t.
8) Do you have any competitors doing this idea?
There are a few websites that are trying to do eSports betting but that is all they are trying to do. As I said our main goal is to take every aspect of the gaming world and bring it into the social network world. If you look at our website you will notice that it is very clean and simple, similar to how Facebook was in the very beginning. Playing video games against other players for real money is just a dream I had and a way to make an already exciting world and make it a hell of a lot more exciting.
9) For fun: When your internet is down, what site do you go to check if it is working?
Google.
10) Any advice for Startups #nofilter?
My wife is a former journalist and she always advises- original content as much as possible.
Editor of Startups #nofilter
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