PLLAY

PLLAY arrived with a list of product features, but no set specific design requirements — music to our creative ears.

We began our work by putting ourselves in the user’s shoes, imagining the experience from the initial onboarding experience, and building wireframe designs one user journey stage at a time. This approach gave us an unusual amount of freedom to measure which features worked best with a community of internal and community testers — a truly agile approach.

Employing MACH principles, we built PLLAY on top of a layered microservice architecture, with multiple best-of-breed services integrating into the platform.

Using computer vision, an AI technology, gives PLLAY’s platform the ability to ‘watch’ users’ gameplay in action, and make split-second determinations about the rightful victor of each match. PLLAY’s platform observes players’ Twitch streams, decodes gameplay into usable data, and then uses this to determine the winner.

With two distinct payment systems within one app, PLLAY presented some unique challenges and opportunities.

An in-app wallet gave players a way to transfer funds in order to place wagers on their head-to-head gameplay. Using the blockchain for a secure and transparent audit of all wagers, Amazon Quantum Ledger was the system of choice. We paired this with multiple payment methods, including Skrill, PayPal, and more, which ensures a wallet that reacts quickly enough to award their payout instantly. And PLLAY’s composable tech stack allows these payment systems to be easily swapped out for other best-of-breed platforms, giving PLLAY the flexibility they need for the future.

Players also need to purchase either subscriptions or tokens within the app to be able to start or participate in a match. This required the approval of the Apple App Store review team, easily received due to the quality of info we provided proving our compliance.

On the front-end, the PLLAY mobile app was developed using React Native. Building AI elements into the PLLAY app required the development of a full API communications protocol. Finally, we used UX copy to ensure a high-energy, on-brand user experience across the app.

Because PLLAY is a fully-regulated, skill-based platform that involves real money for head-to-head wagering experiences, PLLAY needed to follow specific government and state regulations. For instance, to meet the KYC (know-your-customer) compliance, we drew on many different identity solutions that could be used and changed based on need.

And while QA testing is always an important part of app development, it’s especially essential for wagering platforms. On top of delivering a world-class experience through the testing of components during the development process, PLLAY’s app also needed rigorous QA testing to ensure all regulatory and compliance needs were met.

PLLAY’s exceptional AI technology deserved a marketing push to match. Working within a previously established brand, we launched a go-to-market strategy featuring refreshed copy and visual content and a targeted email campaign, to rave reviews from the PLLAY team.

The most important part of this launch was bringing PLLAY to the Apple App Store. Not only did we have to check all the boxes for compliance and regulatory criteria, but an additional level of diligence was also needed to ensure the app could be released on Apple’s App Store based on their standards. Drawing on our expertise in this field, we were able to understand requirements, respond to reviewers, and get the PLLAY app live in the Apple App Store over a very short period of time.

Behind the scenes, we ensured that infrastructure was in place to provide the PLLAY team with analysis and feedback on each customer touchpoint, from ad clicks to free play credits spent all the way to long-term subscriptions.