Computer program Battle of Minds - “Battle of Minds - a game with benefits! Rules and subtleties. Statistics

In 2011, in the small Swedish town of Gothenburg, the Wilsted brothers teamed up with the Landin brothers. They registered the company FEO Media and a year later announced a quiz for mobile phones Quizcampen. Today the game is presented in 21 countries around the world. FEO Media reached Russia only in August 2014. Today, the Russian version of “Battle of Minds” has already been downloaded by more than six million people. It provides a quarter of the company's total revenue.

How it all began

Robert Wilstead, Founder of FEO Media: This was in 2010. Back then everyone was obsessed with mobile apps. My friend Kalle and I, who is now in charge of our development software, got excited about the idea of ​​starting our own business. He was in his last year at university and as thesis I built some little game. He really liked it. I also saw what was happening around me, in the sense that games for mobile phones were taking off.

The idea was born long and painfully. We originally wanted to do social game, where a person can compete with his friends. Naturally, we were eager to come up with something completely new, fresh, revolutionary. But at the same time, we needed at least some guarantees that people would play it. We sat all evenings and blew the minds of our friends and relatives. Eventually my brother Henrik locked himself in a room and said he wouldn't come out until he came up with a concept. A couple of hours later he approached us with the idea of ​​Quizkampen. Two people play against each other. They answer questions of different categories, six rounds of three questions each. And we understood: this is what we need. On the one hand, this is a familiar quiz. On the other hand, we introduced a competitive element. This is our specialty. Before, you could only play with yourself. And this gets boring quickly.

FEO Media

mobile applications, games

START DATE: August 2014

Company annual turnover: 92 million CZK

"Battle of Minds"

We started thinking about Russia from the very beginning. I went to various exhibitions in Europe, and most companies involved in mobile applications were looking at the Russian market. Smartphones are very popular in Russia. At the same time, people from all over the CIS play the Russian version. For example, “Battle of Minds” unexpectedly ended up in first place in the Kazakh top mobile applications. The only problem is that the application is not available in Crimea. The game works fine in both Russia and Ukraine, but in Crimea some bugs constantly appear.

We started preparing the Russian version in 2013. It took a whole year to translate and compose the questions. Therefore, we launched only in August 2014. At first, the game gained momentum slowly. The boom only happened in February 2015.

The name “Battle of Minds” was invented by our manager for Russia Evgeniy. There was also a version of “Tournament,” but Zhenya said that “Battle of Minds” sounded better. I don't speak Russian at all. I only know “yes”, “no”, “to your health”, “truth”, “perestroika” and “glasnost”. I've never been to Russia. But my brother was - I hope this somehow excuses us.

Feo Media currently employs 53 people, a little less than half of them part-time. Most are regional managers, they check the questions that players send us and answer complaints. Three people are engaged in the “battle of wits”. Russian players are very sensitive to topics related to sex. We have a section "In healthy body", where medical issues are published. So, everything related to the reproductive system is taboo. Otherwise we receive a hundred letters a day. At first they somehow tried to explain that this is biology and scientific terms, but then they reconciled. Apparently this is a cultural feature. In addition, the game has a “4+” marker, so we must take into account the opinions of the players.

Competitors

We are often compared to the game "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". Perhaps because it is the most famous quiz. But the principle of the game is completely different. They had to adjust the TV show for mobile version. We initially danced away from phones and could use their full potential. For example, we have a chat where rivals can chat. Sometimes such communication leads to funny consequences. A couple from Germany, for example, decided to get married. They met in the game, and we helped the guy propose through a quiz. It happens that players behave incorrectly. Then we remove their profiles from the game. Our employees do not have access to personal correspondence, so we rely on complaints from other users.

In general, any mobile application can be considered our competitor, not necessarily a quiz. If a person plays Candy Crush, it means that he is not playing Battle of Wits; if he posts a photo on Instagram or chats with someone on Facebook, it also means that he is not using our application.

Photos courtesy of FEO Media

Battle of Minds - show all your knowledge and take first place in the ranking of the smartest!

Do you like quizzes? Want to show off all your knowledge and see if you can beat the other competitors? Or do you just want to spend a few hours of your free time with interest? Then the game Battle of Minds is for you.

It combines a quiz, communication with other players, discussion of various issues, and the ability to invite your friends to play with you - the concept of the game does not end there. Is the game as good as the developers claim? This is what we will check in this review, considering all the advantages and disadvantages gameplay. Also below you will learn how to download Battle of Minds to your computer.

About the game

A little about the creators

The game was developed by the studio of Swedish developers FEO Media AB, famous for their mind games, in which the user must not only show his knowledge and expand his horizons, but also simply have fun while enjoying communication with others. Their goal is to create educational, but fun games, connecting people around the world. The main difference from competitors is multi-platform, excellent localization for dozens of different languages, as well as a user-friendly interface. On at the moment the company is focused on two games: Pixduel (a quiz in the form of “picture” questions about pop culture) and Battle of Minds, which we are reviewing today.

Gameplay

After starting the game, the user has the opportunity to compete with other participants in quizzes lasting from 5 minutes to 3 days. One of the key features is that you can run several quizzes at once, competing with several participants at the same time.

There are 6 rounds in total, each of which has three questions for participants with the same topic. Everyone chooses a topic sequentially, that is, through a round. A correctly answered question gets one point. In the end it is calculated total quantity points from the participants, after which the winner is announced. By the way, during the game you can not only answer questions, but also talk with your opponent in a special chat, finding new friends and acquaintances right in the middle of an intellectual battle.

What does victory give? Not only good mood and motivation to play further, but also an increase in rating. With each battle won, the opponents will become stronger and stronger, and the difficulty of the game will increase depending on the rating gained. When you leave the game, your points are deducted, which is fair enough.

Do you want to come up with questions for the game yourself? This can also be done. Moreover, the editors select the most best questions and rewards their authors with valuable prizes and awards in the game.

Interface

I am pleased with the simple interface with a convenient arrangement of windows. Nothing superfluous on the screen - only the most important. From the menu, you can immediately go to the active quiz tab, view your score and see whose turn it is. By clicking on an active quiz, you will see the nickname and avatar of the person fighting you, as well as the score and round. Everything is arranged simply and clearly, you can get used to the game in a matter of seconds.

Optimization

The game is optimized for top level. Animation occurs without loss of frames even when large quantities existing quizzes, the program does not reduce the performance of the device, chat messages appear without delay.

Diversity

You don't read books or are interested in history, but you love games and TV series? Don't worry, the game will be welcoming for you too, as in each new quiz you will be able to choose your own question categories for 3 rounds. More than 25 thousand questions: from computer games to the history of the Ancient Era, from films to clothing and accessories. The game is amazingly diverse; each time you will be faced with more and more new questions.

Video review

Gameplay and features of the game on PC

• A convenient system for selecting opponents, depending on the rating and number of matches played.
• Diversity. More than ten different categories in which everyone will see interesting questions.
• Possibility to create an avatar.
• Users develop the game community by sending new questions and receiving gifts for this.
• Communication. While fighting with opponents, you can discuss various issues, get acquainted, find friends.
• Simplicity. Downloaded, logged in, won. Just a few minutes and you can play Battle of Wits on your computer.
• Audience. More than 3 million installations worldwide, the game is translated into dozens of languages.

Game controls

The game is controlled using computer mouse. The wheel is for scrolling, the left and right keys are for selecting questions, answering, setting, and so on.

How to install Battle of Minds on your computer

Method 1. Installation using an emulator

Meet the best emulator Play Market-BlueStacks. Easy to use, access to hundreds of thousands of different applications and utilities, no viruses - and all this is absolutely free.

• Loading.
• We confirm the license agreement.
• Select a location for installation on your hard drive.
• Let's start the installation.
• After the installation is complete, launch the emulator.
• Let's go to Google account Play. If you don’t have one, you can register in a couple of clicks by filling out a few fields.
• We go to the search engine and find the desired program there. By clicking on “Install”, you will start downloading the program. Once the download is complete, we recommend restarting your computer.

Method 2. “Archive” installation

• Download the archive with installation files and text instructions from our website.
• Unpack the files to your desktop or to a folder on your hard drive.
• Let's launch a text document.
• Following the instructions in it, download the game and the emulator that comes with it.

Let's sum it up

The Battle of Minds app is an excellent quiz that you can download not only to show your level of knowledge and see how smarter you are than other players, but also to have fun. We recommend downloading Battle of Minds on your computer for those who want to make new friends and compete in intelligence with the most smart people Russia!

At the beginning of 2011, the Wilstead brothers offered cooperation to the Lundin brothers, the purpose of which was to found the IT company FEO Media. So a group of like-minded people from the small Swedish town of Gothenburg rallied around the idea of ​​​​developing a phone application called “Quizkampen” in the format of an educational quiz. Having traveled to more than twenty countries around the world, the game reached Russia, where it was downloaded by over 6 million users. Russian version“Quizkampen” - “Battle of Minds” is rapidly gaining popularity and, according to experts, can even compete with such games as “My Guests” and “Nano-farm”. A quarter of the affiliates' enterprise income comes from the quiz.

Start.

According to Henrik Wilsted, 2010 was marked by increased interest in mobile applications. They were developed by many enthusiasts: from computer science college students to experienced employees of technology companies. He and his classmate Kalle, who holds the position of head of the development department at FEO Media, did not want to lag behind the trend and decided to found their own startup. In my last year at Calle University, as a thesis I created a simple toy for smartphone. He was very interested in such things and intended to build a career in gaming. Vilstead watched with interest the hysteria happening around him, which in Sweden was called the “mobile boom,” and hastened to take advantage of the situation.

The decision to develop their own game was made instantly, but it remained unclear what exactly should be invented. Friends wanted to create a strategy where the user could fight step-by-step with his friends, while gaining points and receiving artifacts. Many ideas were explored and surveys were conducted among friends and relatives to see if they would like to play such a game. In fact, the process of inventing the concept was long and painful, since none of the working ideas seemed original to Wilstead. The process of developing an application and its further promotion is a very complex, resource-intensive work that requires sacrifices in terms of money and time. You can develop a game for years, exhaust all your strength, and eventually run into a terribly unpleasant fact when users simply did not like it or found it incomprehensible.

Then Henrik desperately declared that he would nail the door of his room and not leave there until he found a suitable game concept. Three hours later, he came out to the others and enthusiastically announced that a solution had been found, and its name was “Quizkampen”. The essence of the game was a confrontation between two users who needed to answer questions from various categories. The game was divided into six rounds, each round containing three questions. The friends immediately realized that the idea could work: the meaning of the game seemed to be common, but in this case an element of competition between the players was introduced. In such games, the user mainly competes only with himself, which quickly becomes boring, to the point of deleting the application from the smartphone.

About development.

Putting the idea into practice turned out to be much more difficult than simply designing the concept. Only after starting to develop the application, the founders of FEO Media realized why most companies developing games for smartphones adhere to classic version, where only one player takes the quiz. In the case of the Wilsteads, it was necessary to split all the players into pairs and then connect them with each other so that the “battle” could begin. Currently, the application has more than 50 million users, so a huge number of competitions take place in the system every hour, and its “fall” can lead to catastrophic consequences. However, the developers coped with the tasks. Thanks to their teaching profession, the Wilstead brothers independently managed to enter more than eight thousand questions into the application.

"Quizkampen" was launched in 2012, a year after painstaking work on the project. And a year later, the application managed to squeeze into first place in the Swedish download rankings in the Appstore.

Sweden is a country with exorbitant taxes and fees. According to tax legislation, an employee pays 30% of his salary to the state treasury, and another 30% is withheld from the employer from the amount of all payments to employees. Therefore, friends more than a year I had to work without salary so that my savings would be enough to develop the project.

About European markets.

The Wilsteads admit that they did not expect such wild success for their quiz. At some point, they decided that since they managed to gain popularity in Sweden, then why not expand their geographic presence to the markets of neighboring countries. Then they began to translate the questions into various languages, and also removed those that were known only to the native Swedish population.

According to the founders, the development of mobile applications and their further promotion is not a very expensive business. Two thousand dollars is usually enough for promotion. On the European continent, the development of the project is due to the widespread use of the capabilities of the social network Facebook. For promotion in Russia, VKontakte tools were used. As it turned out, focusing on the American audience results in serious expenses: every second application has an English version and the competition there is simply enormous. It turns out that a lot of money is spent on marketing, but the increase in users is relatively small. Along with the USA, for example, in the Republic of Poland, “Quizkampen” is the only quiz of its kind; there are no analogues yet. By the way, in this country it is called “Quizwanie”.

Generally speaking, then greatest distribution The game gained popularity in countries such as Russia, France, and the Scandinavian countries, where being educated and well-read is a matter of prestige. An enlightened person stands much higher in status than one who has little interest in self-education.

"Quizkampen" in Russia.

The course towards the Russian market, where the popularity of smartphones is great, was predicted from the first day the company was founded. Entrepreneurs traveled around European countries, took part in exhibitions and hackathons, assessed the potential of each country. “Battle of Minds” is played by users from all over the CIS. Surprisingly, in Kazakhstan the game took first place in the ranking of popular applications. However, there is a problem - the game is not available to residents of Crimea, despite the fact that you can play it freely on the territory of Ukraine.

The FEO Media company began preparing localization for Russian users in 2013. It took more than a year to compose the questions and translate them. Since the appearance of the quiz in Russia, downloads have been weak, which made the brothers seriously nervous. There were not enough available funds to replenish the advertising budget, and the outcome of such expenses would remain unknown. But, fortunately, a breakthrough began in mid-2014, when the number of downloads Russian users began to increase exponentially.

Since none of the Landins and Wilsteads had ever been to Russia and did not know the Russian language, not counting the words “glasnost”, “perestroika”, “yes/no”, it was entrusted to the manager Evgeniy, who was responsible for the presence in the CIS, to come up with the name of the game for the Russian market . We looked at various options, including Ternirum. As a result, Evgeniy insisted on the name “Battle of Minds,” which, in his opinion, should have become a successful brand.

Currently, FEO Media is a small company with 35 employees. Half of these guys, for reasons of austerity, work half-time. Of these, 20 people are representatives various countries, where the quiz is localized. 3 employees are responsible for promotion and support in Russia. They monitor the filling of the application with new questions, changes in rules and legislation, and also establish communications with players who send suggestions or complaints.

The founders were faced with the fact that the Russian audience is very sensitive to topics related to sex. The fact is that among the quiz questions there are some that are related to biological and anatomical terms. Statistics show that Russian players actively respond to the emergence of such issues and promptly express their concerns or complain. Company representatives are forced to remove such content, although they themselves do not see anything reprehensible in it. It happens that a game has to be given a “+4” rating in order to limit access to it by teenagers.

About competitors.

The game “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” is very popular in Russia. In this regard, a parallel is sometimes drawn between it and the Wilstead’s “Battle of Wits”. However, it is fundamentally wrong to compare these games, since “Battle of Wits” has a number of significant differences. To popularize the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” quiz, a whole TV show was created, where a lot of resources were poured into it. FEO Media spent relatively little money on promotion and promoted the application independently. “Battle of Minds” allows players to conduct discussions during the game, that is, correspond.

Sometimes this gives rise to funny cases. One day a couple from Germany got so carried away by the game that in the background common interests decided to get married. Unfortunately, there are also unpleasant stories when players can get angry and be rude to each other. In such situations, the accounts of both are safely and irrevocably deleted. FEO Media employees do not have direct access to user correspondence, as they strictly adhere to confidentiality rules. Arbitration between the parties is carried out on the basis of consideration of complaints received from users.

About profit.

The project makes money by issuing premium accounts and advertising. Advertising banners pop up when the player completes another round. You can get rid of banners by purchasing a premium account, the cost of which varies depending on operating system: 169 rubles in Play Market and 96 rubles in AppStore. In addition to eliminating advertising, such an account provides the player with additional functions, such as viewing fight statistics and changing your avatar.

To monetize the game, FEO Media uses the mobile service Mopub, where advertisers are concentrated. It operates according to a special principle: “whoever pays the most orders advertising.” Companies evaluate Quizkampen in terms of coverage target audience and can select specific user groups among whom they want to position their products or services. Among the advertisers there are even competing services that are immediately blocked. Regarding advertising, there are restrictions in Sweden. For example, it is prohibited to broadcast advertising information to children and teenagers.

In 2014, an agreement was concluded between the German concern Ravensburger and FEO Media, which provided for the production board games, where there will be a quiz “Quizkampen”. According to the terms of the deal, Ravensburger will pay a commission for using the game, but will begin promoting tabletop equipment independently. Currently, two versions of such games are ready, localized for the markets of Italy and Germany. It is possible that a model with a Russian-language interface will soon appear. Looking at the popularity of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, in particular their marketing promotion strategy, the guys from FEO Media decided to launch their own television project. Later, an offer will be considered from the Swedish television company ITV Studios, which intends to acquire broadcast rights.

The founders of “Battle of Minds” do not cooperate with Russian advertisers. At the stage of entering the Russian market, we had experience of interacting only with the administration of the social network Vkontakte. It is possible that the FEO Media marketing department is negotiating cooperation with some Russian brands. Basically, all application users in the regions of presence see the same advertising.

According to the Landins, a year ago an extremely unpleasant situation happened. Advertising in the application was ordered by an American social network, whose audience is gay and transgender. Since the company's top management adheres to European values, which center on tolerance, it was decided to begin cooperation. A few hours after submitting their content, the founders’ corporate inbox began to receive angry letters, which even contained threats of legal action. Management had no choice but to hastily terminate the advertising contract with the social network.

Companies from the Russian segment turn to FEO Media mainly so that the quiz questions include those that would indicate their trademarks. In return they offer significant sums. For example, the questions should include: “The best clinic in Moscow”, “The place where you can buy the most delicious pizza in St. Petersburg.” But the service’s policy does not allow accepting such offers, despite the fact that good profits may be lost. Questions for the quiz, which may include clinics and eateries, according to the Wilsteads, are sent by the users themselves. The reputation of the game, as well as the company as a whole, will be struck, since users are not interested in their time spent being used for someone else’s selfish purposes. The flow of proposals from users is carefully moderated for spam and advertising by FEO Media employees.

The game Battle of Minds will help you calculate the limits of your own intelligence. You are invited to compete with other gamers and have a real brainstorming session. The questions cover a wide variety of topics, so get ready for a serious challenge.

How to play Battle of Minds

Choose an opponent from your friends on Facebook or random person. Afterwards you will begin to decide on the topics you want to think about and you will get three questions with various options. Choose the right one and continue the process. This is done by clicking the mouse. Your opponent will also answer these tasks, and it will be his turn to choose the topic of the next round. Based on correct guesses, points are calculated.

Many people want to download this wonderful intelligent application for Android, but they need to play on the computer in real time in order to fully speak with users. In total you will need to overcome six levels. Sometimes the wait for answers takes a long time, but there is a simple solution. You can simultaneously connect to several competitions and answer questions one by one.

In Battle of Minds there is a small cozy chat where you can get to know the person you are competing with. Some find new friends thanks to this wonderful game and begin to communicate in real life.