Just in time for fans facing the prospect of pigskin withdrawal after this weekend’s Saints vs. Colts Superbowl matchup, Foxborough, MA-based Quick Hit has added an intriguing, and potentially lucrative, new feature to its online football strategy game. For the first time, it’s giving players the chance to add past NFL greats of their choice to their own teams.
According to Quick Hit CEO Jeffrey Anderson, players can now put pros like Barry Sanders, Christian Okoye, or Ed “Too Tall” Jones into their lineups, using “coaching points” that they can either earn over time simply by playing the game, or purchase instantly for cash. It’s the first time since Quick Hit launched its online game last October that the company has ventured into the realm of virtual goods purchases, an increasingly important revenue source for many online gaming and social networking companies.
Up to now, Anderson explains, the teams that Quick Hit players develop and field in each game—whether in single-player games, or against another player—have consisted mostly of fictional characters called “Joes,” together with a couple of real football personalities called, naturally enough, “Pros.” Now players can buy more Pros over time, choosing from a starting roster of 130 football legends.
“Adding players of the type of legends that we’ve got makes your team instantly recognizable,” says Anderson. “A lot of these people are Hall of Fame, Pro-Bowl players who have had famous careers in the NFL. We believe we’re the first product in the world to offer the ability to use virtual currency to acquire players.”
The “legend” players come in three ability classes known as elite, premium, and classic, and are priced accordingly. To keep games even, Anderson says, Quick Hit’s programmers have created rules that will prevent less-seasoned players from trouncing competitors simply by purchasing lots of coaching points and stacking their virtual teams with elite athletes. The details are complex—but in essence, players can only buy legends whose abilities roughly match their own experience level in the game. “We talk about it as a salary cap,” Anderson says. “If I’m a level 10, I can’t have a guy who’s a level 100 on my team.”
Anderson says the new roster of legends-for-sale is just the first step toward the rollout of a larger player management system that would allow users to
