ArenaX

About the app

ArenaX started from the idea of gathering prize competitions into a single app. The goal was to run the biggest online esports tournaments in Turkey, and I added talent contests alongside them — singing, short film, cosplay, photography, screenwriting, drawing. On top of that came giveaways, mini games with prizes and live quiz shows. In total there were six separate competition categories.

The real challenge was this: those six categories have nothing in common. An esports tournament has a platform (Xbox, PlayStation, PC), teams and a bracket; a talent contest has file uploads and judging; a giveaway has a draw; and in a game like “whoever holds their finger down longest wins”, the result is produced by the phone itself. I reduced all of them to one shared “competition” model: every competition has an entry format, a duration, a prize and a rule for determining the winner. Only the contents of those four fields are category-specific; listing, search, entry tracking and prize distribution all run on the same code.

On the talent contest side the work turned into user-generated content. People uploaded song recordings, videos, photos and scripts; these had to be stored, resized and reviewed before being published. In a competition with real prizes, moderation is not an optional feature — it is what keeps the product alive.

The live quiz show turned out to be harder than I expected. Everyone had to see the same question at the same moment, the answer window had to follow server time rather than device time, and answers arriving after the window closed had to be discarded. The prize side needed the same rigor: earning and spending tokens goes through a single accounting flow, and prize distribution could only run once per competition.

I ran the entire product on my own, including the idea, design, development and app store release.

ArenaX is not live today: problems came up on the app store policy side. Apps containing prize competitions are one of the categories the stores treat most carefully; entry, prize distribution and every mechanic involving an element of chance are subject to separate rules. Learning this after the project was well underway proved expensive. Today, when I design anything with a prize or competition mechanic, I read the store guidelines before I write any code — retrofitting compliance is far harder than designing for it from the start.