Stryking — From The Beginning…
After my former company, the online games publisher Frogster Interactive was sold to a bigger competitor, I took a break of around 9 months to just do the things I wanted to such as travelling, spending time with myself and my friends and step-by-step thinking about what my next steps should be.
It was clear to me that I would start a new company and that this time it should go beyond the pure development and publishing of games. I wanted to use my learnings and experiences of free-to-play games and I saw plenty of opportunities to fill gaps in the industry and to find new ways of monetising the significantly growing number of free-to-play online and mobile games.
As my background and main interest lies in marketing, I was fascinated by the possibility to connect brands with the amazing popularity and reach that free-to-play games had achieved since they first arose. So the initial idea was to create ways for brands to be seamlessly integrated into games which target their same group of consumers. We developed a technical solution to integrate merchandise and other real-life products next to the virtual items in the in-game shops of free-to-play games and with the same SDK it was possible to implement native advertising campaigns within the games.
It was an ambitious plan and long story short, it didn’t work out… It took us too long to develop and go-to-market. So we quickly made the decision to pivot and concluded that we should build our own game platform to connect virtual life with real life in a way that it creates benefits for all parties involved.
We had already worked with sports games a lot because there is a natural fit between these and real life brands and products, which is what we had grown familiar working with, so in 2014 we took a deeper look at the, then burgeoning, US phenomenon: Fantasy Sports. In Germany, we call those forms of sports fan prediction games “Manager Games” and after we had analysed the market, we realised there was a lot of room to leverage our knowledge and experience from the free-to-play games space to create a compelling user experience for football fans.
All the detailed statistics such as successful passes, successful tackles, shots on goal, kilometres run etc. had just been established in football by the sports data providers and football fans were receptive to these and quickly became deeply engrossed. This is the basis for a Fantasy Sports product, so we now had the chance to create a Fantasy Sports experience which is really well tailored to football fans’ interests and could be brought to passionate football fans around the globe.
It took us almost three years to develop “Football-Stars” to the stage it can be played now and we continue to take great pleasure in working tirelessly on it day-by-day.
Now we are entering the next exciting phase with our own STRYKZ token and the tokenisation of the platform in order to give the power back to fans and to let them really participate in the growth of the community!
Stay tuned and join our Telegram channel here: https://t.me/STRYKZ
Quote of the day: “You can’t score a goal if you don’t take a shot.” — Johan Cruyff
