The game developer Matchday has unveiled a trivia and match prediction game, licensed by FIFA Women’s World Cup.
The game is among the new video game licenses issued by FIFA, the world football association, after its controversial breakup with long-time partners EA Sports.
The new game arrives with the FIFA Women’s World Cup Australia & New Zealand 2023, which is coming up quickly on July 20.
This year’s World Cup is by far the largest women’s football tournament to date, organizers say, raising expectations that associated licenses such as the new Matchday Challenge will see increased user and consumer interest.
Matchday Challenge is being released as a free-to-play (f2p) game, which can be played on any device with an internet connection.
The idea of Matchday Challenge is to give players the opportunity to unlock exclusive digital cards of their favorite FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 stars by testing their fan knowledge, predicting the winning teams and players, while competing against their friends and fellow fans.
“At Matchday, we’ve been hard at work building football-themed games that bring fans together around the ‘beautiful game’,” said Sebastien de Halleux, Matchday co-founder and chief gaming officer. “Matchday Challenge is a perfect companion game that reflects our fandom for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, and the meteoric rise of women’s football in general. We’ve built an interactive experience that will unite fans around their knowledge of, and excitement for, these amazing women’s teams while also giving fans ways to unlock and collect beautiful digital cards of their favorite players which they can own forever or trade as they wish.”
Matchday builds games for 5 billion football fans featuring officially licensed players and tournaments, in partnership with FIFA and FIFPRO. The company was founded by technology and gaming veterans who have successfully started and sold companies including Playfish, which was acquired by EA Games; Glu Mobile; Hoodline; Spin; and Viki. All of those gaming enterprises were acquired by other companies, other than one which went public through an IPO.
Matchday is incubated and funded by football star Leo Messi’s Play Time, and backed by leading investors, with teams in San Francisco and Barcelona.
This new version of Matchday Challenge tests the football knowledge of FIFA fans by challenging them to a series of rapid-fire quiz questions. As players answer questions correctly, they advance further up the pitch until they score a goal. The more goals they score, the more exclusive digital cards players can win as they look to grow their collection, showcased in their own custom gallery of FIFA Women’s World Cup women’s player cards from around the world.
Players can also square off against the Matchday community by predicting each match’s winner and final score, while their growing roster of player cards turbo-charges their rise up the leaderboard.
Matchday says it is ushering in a new category of sports games wherein fans build virtual squads by collecting digital cards of their favorite footballers. Players have true ownership of the cards and other digital items that they acquire as part of Matchday Challenge as they collect, trade and grow their dream team. As the Matchday ecosystem grows, players will continue to be able to play with their FIFA Women’s World Cup cards across any Matchday future titles.
This is the second licensed game of this type that Matchday has produced in partnership with FIFA. Matchday previously saw success with the launch of the limited-time Matchday Challenge: FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Edition, which coincided with last year’s FIFA Men’s World Cup. The mini-game saw nearly 600,000 signups during the tournament, with more than two million player cards distributed.
Fans can jump straight into the action of Matchday Challenge at challenge.matchday.com. Players will also have the chance to win a selection of exclusive real world football prizes and vouchers for the FIFA Store, allowing them to win official FIFA Women’s World Cup merchandise and more.
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