Challenger is taking competition to the next level as Warzone gets a level up.

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Challenger is a platform providing a new way for gamers of all skill levels to compete with real money against other players on their favorite video games. Recently, they announced the launch of their Call of Duty: Warzone offering, making the company the first esports solution to enable gamers to compete in peer-to-peer cash contests in battle royale gaming. We spoke with one of Challengers founders, Chris Andres, to learn more about this new offering.

Chris: “Challenger came as an idea originally between my co-founder and me, we were actually playing Battlefield at the time, and he was feeling particularly good about how he was playing. And he goes, Oh man, I wish we could bet a dollar a kill on this.

And I said, Yeah, we should be able to do that. Why can’t we do that? And that really was what kicked it off. We started to look in the market and saw that the only solutions that existed were tournaments with brackets.

We were surprised by that. There are a lot of people like us that are a little bit more on the average gamer side, that need something accessible to them. That’s what made it feel like, this is something we have to do and we have to figure this out.”

Challenger uses a new form of technology called computer vision. Combined with artificial intelligence, this allows Challengers technology to constantly monitor the game and give a live report on what is happening.

Chris: “The main issue for us is that while a lot of publishers do provide APIs, they provide that usually at some point after a match has concluded or at some later stage. And they’re also providing a summary of the information. They’re not really giving a play-by-play, like a live sheet api. And that’s what we wanted.

We engineer differently; we use computer vision to effectively watch the gamer playing and use that information combined with artificial intelligence to understand what’s happening within the game for that player. That’s allowed us to introduce new ways for gamers to compete, for gamers to add a little bit of money and a little bit, in my opinion, of excitement to what they’re doing.”

The Cross Lobby System

Chris: “We have an option within the challenger system to play what’s called cross lobby, meaning you can go and play your game and get your score within your lobby of Warzone or Warzone 2 in the future. And that will be your submission. That’s your score. Then when I get online, whether that’s three minutes or three hours later, I play my game in a different lobby. And get the best score that I can. And then those two are what are compared for the contests. And the winner is the winner, whoever did the best based on the rules of that.

So that removes the time dependency and that makes it to where anytime you want, you can always play. And anytime you want, you can always have that money on the line to make it that much more exciting.”