The Israeli who made users addicted: almost 750 thousand games in one weekend
Gal Bartov created "Legioner" in one week, a simple game built with Claude that allows the player to simulate the career of a typical Israeli soccer player. The game became the hottest thing on Twitter and caused 150,000 players to play almost 750,000 careers in 72 hours, with quite a few of them claiming: "You ruined our weekend." Now, in an interview with mako, he talks about the reactions he received, plans for the future, and promises: "There will be no annoying ads."
Soccer fans in the country, and not only them, did not do much during the weekend. The reason is one simple game that managed to spread across social networks and cause severe addiction among hundreds of thousands of users. The game is called "Legioner," named after the term familiar to Israeli players who move to play for teams abroad, whether it's Barcelona or APOEL Nicosia.
The game itself is not complicated; it generates a profile of an Israeli player, including position, country of birth, and preferred foot, then you get several options on how to continue your career. You choose a youth team and slowly see your rating rise according to the decisions you make each season. Soccer geeks can identify a similarity to the legendary game "Manager," where many spent days and nights trying to build the perfect team.
The plot twists include scenarios familiar to sports fans in the country: the user can choose whether to bet with a friend on a game, whether to take a dangerous nutritional supplement, what to do if his team withholds salary, whether to go to escorts, and other known ills of our soccer.
During the weekend, the X network (formerly Twitter) was filled with tweets with screenshots of the game. The virality of the game was so high that yesterday Gal Bartov, the creator of the game, tweeted that he had already reached half a million games played (different careers) and received quite a few reactions in the style: "100 thousand of them are me," "My new addiction," "I threw the phone in the trash because of the addiction."
Bartov tells in an interview with mako about the explosion of "Legioner" and admits that he is already approaching 750 thousand careers played with 150 thousand users, an average of 15 games for each, which is divided less equally because many users will testify that they did hundreds of careers - and all this while the game only went up on Thursday morning.
Gal Bartov is 26 years old, a team leader in the product department at WSC Sports, and built the game in just a week without knowledge of writing code: "I have previous experience with other games that became viral, but Claude really takes me up. I played soccer until the youth level, and I've been a gamer from a young age. The combination of the two created 'Legioner.'"
Although the game was written without knowledge of code, it is not an easy job. Bartov tells about the hard nights: "I would return at six from work and work on it all night. It was an intense week where I barely slept or talked to my girlfriend Tomer. The game itself does not make me money; on the contrary, I lose a lot of money from it. You can imagine what kind of traffic and what cloud costs it takes."
How did this idea come up?
"One of the former team members sent me a game that is similar but different, that caught on in Colombia, and we said it's not done well, and it can be done much better; it's not funny enough and it's not fun enough. In the end, when you localize it to the country, we have to include the low moments of soccer. We knew that if we put this in and made a UI that looks like it should, and invested in the small details that the game in Colombia didn't do, it would catch on great. I took the general idea from it, I said, 'Okay, how do I make this actually good?' I built for myself all the things I want to be in the game, sent an initial alpha version to the guys at work, they said, 'Listen, there's something here.'"
What reactions did you get at work?
"They are crazy about it. I received a lot of compliments from the guys at work, they are really very excited here, and they also sent it in the company's WhatsApp group, praised it to the skies." Bartov laughs: "Now I just hope they don't call me from HR to tell me that I lowered the company's productivity by like 20% because of my game, because everyone is addicted to it. I've already heard a lot of good feedback here from within the company; many of the really good ideas came from my colleagues at work. During the development process, I sat down, showed them, asked for their feedback. Although I am the executor, and also currently I am also reaping most of the compliments, a lot of credit also goes to them. They brought great ideas, and together we made an amazing game."
Why is the game so addictive?
"That's a really good question, which has no one right answer. The first reason is the similarity to the gameplay that was with the Manager, people try to build the best career possible again and again. The second reason is really this whole thing of locality. The third reason, which I didn't expect, is the connection to agents. People send me memes about 'Moti Ashkenazi' and 'Rafi Ben Ami.' But in my opinion, the main reason is that there are so many different ways to play this game. Someone can decide that he is only in Hapoel Tel Aviv, and he tries to reach the highest rating possible with Hapoel Tel Aviv, and someone decides that he is loyal to Lech Poznan. So there are many different ways that people play, and it's charming to see it; that's what makes it so addictive."
So what does the future hold?
Bartov promises that the basketball version is almost ready and expects it to be released this coming weekend, which promises the basketball feed quite a few pictures of careers in the Euroleague or the NBA. But the big success will be to prepare "Legioner" as an international game. "The truth? I didn't expect this traffic. I mean, I was sure it would catch on, I knew it was a good game. But there is a difference between catching on and breaking the net; for me, it was a POC (proof of concept). This is proof of ability that this game is really as good as I thought it would be. And if it caught on in the Israeli league, then of course translating it to English, and adding all sorts of other events that are a bit more global, is not hard work. So definitely there is a direction here for an international version too. I don't know if it will happen, when it will happen, but for now I am mainly focusing on improving the existing one, making it even more precise, adding basketball, and then when we know there is a lot of demand for an international one, then I will also make an international version."
How do you make money from it?
In the meantime, as mentioned, Bartov does not make money from the game, but it is too early to write off the option - after all, only one weekend has passed. But he does promise: "If I introduce ads, it will not be at the expense of the players. Users get addicted to the game because it's fun, and they don't push ads on them that they are used to being pushed on them in every other game. If I introduce monetization capabilities in the future, they will not be aggressive, they will not be part of the game, but alongside it. Even if there are ads, they will not be aggressive, they will not be annoying ones that you have to watch 30 seconds of an ad to do something. That's my promise to the players."
