Almost all football fans know of the European Fantasy Premier League game and enjoy assembling their teams and winning prizes. Who founded this game and what was the purpose, “Trendify” talked with Moataz Metwally, Engineer and founder of “Fer2etak.com”.
I have had a passion for Football for a long time, and since I enjoy playing the Fantasy Premier League game, I decided why not create one for Egyptian teams.
I’m an industry engineer, which is a completely different field than game creation, but I have the motive that once I start something, I go through with it until I am satisfied with the result.
I contacted some friends to find a software developer to help me through this project, and after I did, I told him “I want to create a game similar to the Fantasy Premier League”. The game theme and layout is almost similar, but with an Egyptian touch.
How it Works (Simulation)
It is the same concept as the European game. You enter the game with a virtual budget of 100 million, you then form your team of 15 players, consisting of 2 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 5 midfielders and 3 (forwards). You could only choose 3 players from each team in the game (the teams are real-life players, from actual Egyptian teams).You also choose a captain for your team each game week, and depending on the real-life results in matches, the captain you choose doubles your score in the game.
After submitting your team formation every “game week”, the pointing system is a reflection of the real-life players’ performance into the game. For example, the previous Ahly vs. Zamalek match which ended with them both scoring a goal each, the players who scored the goals got winning points in the game, making the person who chose them in their team win the extra points. The pointing system is explained in detail on the game’s website.
For three or four years we used to give the winners a PlayStation 4 (PS4) as the number one prize, but now it is difficult to keep up since it requires sponsorships, therefore I had to lower the prizes since I manage this project on my own. Now, the gam week winner gets 1000 pounds, the season winner gets 10,000 pounds.
We also have a competition within the game called the “Cup”, where the game players compete with their teams against each other, with the same rules as the normal game week, and whoever wins would get 5000 pounds.
It is almost the same as the European Fantasy League, I only changed one game rule. In the European version, if a player gets a penalty, they get an assist, if they lose that, they don't get anything else. Personally, I didn’t like this rule since the player loses his effort throughout the game, and since the game depends on individual performance, I added a feature called “penalty won” that consists of two points instead of three for the assist, and whether the player scores or loses his penalty point, he gets his score.
We have “power-ups” that boost your score when used, you have one of each to use each month, just like the Fantasy Premier League. However, we do not give the prizes to those who use these booster chips, as they would already have an advantage.
Each person registering into the game signs up with their phone number, which is how we contact the winners to submit the prizes to them. Many people however sometimes do not understand that they need to add correct contact information, and we sometimes fail to find the person who won because of this issue, so we move on to the next person with the highest score, and so on until we find someone who checks off the winning role in any of the competitions. We also post the winners on our official Facebook page. We try to commit to finding the correct winners, we do not neglect them.