Imagine playing Halo 3 with a lot more at stake than losing a virtual life. What if, every time you were injured by an opponent, your bank account took a hit as well?
That’s the idea behind Kwari, a "first-person shooter skill-based cash-for-kills" online game, set to debut in the New Year.
Players of Kwari will suffer automatic deductions from their bank accounts when they are hit in a game, as well as deposits when they strike their opponents. The amounts can be anything from one cent to one dollar per hit depending on the stakes for the game.
There is also a fractional cost if they pick up additional weapons or health packs, with the money being pooled into a jackpot.
In 16 to 64 player match-ups, jackpots are shared between the gamer in possession of a smoking sphere called the Pill at the end of the game and the player who had held it the longest.
Kwari is the idea of Eddie Gill, a former games producer for Activision and Konami, and the company of around 20 employees is based in London.
It is a more sophisticated take on cash-for-gaming than winner-takes-all services such as Tournament.com, which went offline last month, and SkillGround.
"We have engineered the game around the exchange of cash from the ground up," says Clive Hibberd, chief executive.
He says the challenge has been to record the millions of mini-transactions in the game in a huge database and carry out double-entry book-keeping as money is transferred.
Kwari will be released in Europe first, due to uncertainty about how it will be viewed by the authorities in the US, where internet gambling is banned. Kwari argues it should be classified as a skill-based game as opposed to gambling, where luck is more involved.
Kwari will make money by selling ammunition to players. Mr Hibberd anticipates 5,000 bullets costing $5 and lasting a player for one or two hours.
Hard-core gamers are the target audience and 12,000 have signed up for a closed beta of the game.
"There’ll be weekly, monthly and annual jackpot prizes and we expect to have our first gamer millionaire by 2009," says Mr Hibberd.
