His battle royale ends with a cash-out; Overland Park game designer launches Prize Brawl

Most battle royale games follow a familiar formula: Drop onto a map, find weapons and equipment, take out other players, and try to survive. Mark Menke has added another incentive: getting paid for those in-game kills.

The 25-year-old Overland Park game developer launched Prize Brawl Aug. 22, bringing his 50-player battle royale to gaming enthusiasts after years of development. The brawl rewards players based on their performance and kills.

Menke built much of it himself, learning game development along the way — albeit through an unconventional path.

“I went to school for economics. This kind of stuff just interests me. It came to me,” he said of the process.

The game concept began in college as a side project and originally wasn’t even intended to be a traditional PC game with a focus on virtual reality, Menke noted. Once he realized VR wasn’t catching on as intended, he pivoted.

He ultimately graduated the University of Colorado Boulder in 2023 and that early experiment grew into a much larger undertaking, requiring Menke to not only build a game but also teach himself how to make its multiplayer infrastructure function.

Where gameplay meets real money

Players purchase coins through the game’s online shop, then earn coins through gameplay. Players can ultimately cash those coins out through PayPal.

“You go into the online shop, and you buy coins to play with, and then every kill you get in the game, you get one of those coins back,” said Menke. “Then you can immediately go into the cash out button in your inventory, put in your PayPal, and it’ll take that amount of gold out of your account and then send you that much money.”

Menke views the model as a skill-based competition rather than traditional gambling.

“You’re not playing against the house,” he noted.

The idea was partly inspired by other apps and games experimenting with rewards. The model also lets Menke connect the cost of running the game to its user base. Multiplayer games require servers, and those costs increase as more people play.

“In this instance, the more people that are using it, I’m also getting sort of instant return on them using it because I get revenue,” said Menke.

A promotional image showing the worldbuilding within Mark Menke’s Prize Brawl game; courtesy image

Learning the hard parts as he built

Menke used Unreal Engine to build Prize Brawl, with much of the hardest work happening behind the scenes.

An in-game screenshot from within Mark Menke’s multiplayer Prize Brawl; courtesy image

“The server stuff was really complicated,” he said.

While plenty of tutorials exist for working with Unreal Engine, Menke said, he found fewer resources for connecting a game and exposing its multiplayer infrastructure. The backend was also more difficult to troubleshoot because problems weren’t always immediately visible.

“That was the most challenging. It’s hard to figure out where the issues were, you know. When I was running into a glitch on that side, I’d be like, OK, I gotta figure out where it is,” said Menke. “Whereas, with the front-end game development side, if there’s a problem, it shows pretty clearly what wasn’t working. The back-end stuff was so complicated.”

The finished game follows a battle royale format. Players drop onto a large map, search for weapons and equipment, and compete against up to 49 other players.

The game map includes a variety of environments, including a town, a Japanese fortress, a small castle, and science-fiction-inspired locations.

An early launch brought fast downloads

Menke has handled nearly every piece of the project himself, beyond development and into advertising. He’d like to build a team around Prize Brawl, but that next step depends on generating enough revenue to support it.

An early collaboration with a streamer gave Menke a glimpse of what a larger audience could look like. The promotion brought in about 32 downloads, he’s now looking toward another promotional push through an online streaming event.

“If I could get multiple streamers streaming at the same time for the next launch, I think that’ll go well,” he said.

He’s also working toward bringing Prize Brawl to mobile. Menke said he hopes to build an iPhone version by the end of the year.

Mark Menke, Prize Brawl; photo by Taylor Wilmore, Startland News

A bigger gameplan

If Prize Brawl gains traction, Menke wants to design additional games around the same rewards-driven model and eventually grow a team to develop them.

“Ultimately, I’d like to expand into other games in the same realm, the prize reward ecosystem, and just get a team eventually and have them start working and improving the game,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun to work on.”

That vision is still taking shape. Right now, Menke is balancing development, marketing and the technical demands of running a multiplayer game while waiting for the revenue needed to grow the operation.

His approach to development remains remarkably hands-on. The game started with a blank template, and Menke gradually built it into something players could actually use.

The money may catch a player’s attention, but Menke wants the game itself to keep them playing.

“I hope they find it fun more than anything,” he said. “I want the actual gameplay itself to be entertaining.”