Mafia had a huge audience online — thousands of players and a live tournament scene — but no service of its own. Matches ran over generic video calls, with moderators tracking roles, timers, and votes by hand. Nobody had built a dedicated product around the game, let alone a subscription business on top of it. That was the job: design one end-to-end

Building one meant solving three things at once: real-time video that holds up in a ten-player game, an interface newcomers can figure out — rules, slang, and gestures are opaque — and a reason to stay: community and competition

Together with the Art & UX agency we ran 46 qualitative interviews — newcomers, paying players, and stream viewers — breaking the offline game down into the elements the platform had to carry: speech order, voting, roles, gestures

We mapped the journey of a new player — from first ad or Twitch stream through registration, first game, and the paywall after game three. The map pinned exactly where emotions dipped: confusion at rules and slang, friction at registration, boredom waiting for a lobby, and surprise at the paywall. These four dips became the redesign's priorities

The game room puts large video windows first — the thing players actually watch. Active controls are grouped for quick access during timed turns, and camera and sound settings live inside the room, so nobody leaves mid-game

Onboarding rules & slang. An in-game help block puts rules, roles, and slang one tap away, so newcomers can check anything without leaving the match

Monetization, reframed. The old paywall after game three was the sharpest dip on the journey map, so we replaced it with Polemica Pro — an opt-in subscription that sells status and access instead of blocking play. Monetization now rides on the two reasons players stay: competition and community

We directed the rebrand from PlayMafia to Polemica and set the creative process with komnata.agency, driving it to a usable result on a tight timeline. Then I carried the identity across product and physical media: masks, t-shirts, game cards, badges

10k+ players and a $25,000 tournament

The platform grew from zero to 10k+ registered users. In 2021 we hosted MAFPROFI — the largest tournament in sport-mafia history, with a $25,000 prize pool. Together with esports studio Maincast