Mobile Gamers Can Now Get Rewards For Playing With This App
Mistplay is an app that allows you to play mobile games in exchange for gift cards.
Mistplay is the brainchild of Montreal-native Henri-Charles Machalani who started working on the app at night while still employed at Microsoft.
The app, available on the Google Play Store, allows users to accumulate points by playing mobile games that are exchangeable for gift cards at select stores.
Similar to the loyalty rewards programs of brick and mortar stores, players can accumulate points on Mistplay in exchange for gift cards by spending money on the game. However, it is also possible to obtain points for free simply by playing the games.
“That attracts people because you’re already playing games on your phone like Candy Crush,” said Machalani. “But now you can get free money.”
At the moment over 60 games are available through Mistplay but more are added every week. Just over four million people have downloaded this free app from the Google Play store, which is available in twelve countries including the U.S., Canada, many western European countries and Singapore.
But Mistplay didn’t always take on the form of a gaming loyalty rewards program.
When Mistplay was first launched in March 2016, the app was based on getting user feedback on unfinished mobile games. The app’s main clients were game developers.
The app provided these companies with the opportunity for users to test their games and gauge how they could be improved. Mistplay recorded subjective feedback through surveys conducted after every few game levels. It also recorded objective feedback through data collection on how users played the game. The total data was then sold to the game developers.
The inspiration for this original idea came from Machalani’s work at Microsoft. In fact, Machalani is the unsung hero of collecting, analyzing and applying user feedback to online products.
You know those little five-star evaluation pop-ups that show up on all Microsoft products from Skype to Windows 10? That’s Machalani’s work.
When Machalani was working on Windows 10 start menu, he built a feedback system that tracked what you were doing on the computer and asked relevant questions to be answered on a five-star scale.
“I wanted to bring a system similar to that to the gaming world because I have a passion for gaming,” said Machalani. “I grew up on gaming.”
Machalani quit his Seattle job at Microsoft in October 2015 and relocated to Montreal to work on Mistplay full-time. Machalani said that ultimately Microsoft was just to gain experience, make connections and save enough money to start his own company.
“I knew I wanted to start a company so I purposefully lived in low-cost apartments,” said Machalani. “I was paying 500 bucks a month in rent in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. I found a way to get a room in a house so I could save money to start a company. I was under the impression that no investor would believe enough in me to give me money so I had to fund myself. So I saved as much money as I could to bootstrap the company.”
Machalani has had an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age. He built his first online website at the age of 15, attracting around 6,000 visitors daily. When he was still studying at McGill, he built an educational software and sold it to a company in Seattle.
Many companies are now adopting similar gaming loyalty rewards programs.
In fact, Google Play also has a rewards program called Google Play Points. It was piloted last year in Japan and South Korea and it was launched in the United States Nov. 4, 2019, just last week. Like Mistplay, you can earn Play Points to use for special items and discounts in top games like Candy Crush Saga and Pokémon GO.
Winston Mok, product manager for Google Play, said in a blog post “[u]sers have the added benefit of exchanging points for Google Play Credit to use on movies, books, games, and apps.”
Google Play Points does not provide “free money” in that you can’t gain points without spending on games. Moreover, you can only use your points towards other Google products and games available on the Play Store — not giftcards.
Mok wrote “you can also use your points to help support the cause of your choice from a rotating list of nonprofits, starting with Doctors Without Borders USA, Save the Children and the World Food Program USA.”
Mistplay has plans to develop an new product that will help combat climate change but the details of it are still under wraps.
Mistplay is planning on sizing up, partially because of this new project. They also plan on expanding their services to more Asian countries.
