20 ms·

Niantic undergoes layoffs, cancels four games

235 points by lxm 4y ago

k__ 4y ago
I'm surprised they survived that long after Pokemon Go.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  After? I'm the opposite, how can they fail with a game that reportedly [0] took $1.21B in revenue last year (well past its zenith, as you point out) and by its nature it's fixed (doesn't need any development). It seems like it's going to be 200:1 profits to expenditure with those numbers. You've got to do things seriously badly to mess that up?? [0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/
  - brutus1213 4y ago
    I picked up pogo after a few years. They actually seem to be doing quite a bit of development .. lots of locale specific events, weather warnings, more than 151 pokemon, raids, etc. I'm pretty impressed.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      Huh, I went back to it after almost 6 years (first played it when it came out, then after a couple of weeks they changed the app and it wouldn't run on my phone any more) and it seemed almost identical to me. Yes, some more automated events, the integration of weather, but nothing else noticeably different (?) [to me, as yet].
  - k__ 4y ago
    Interesting! I played it when it came out, and it was awesome. Many people where on the streets, best summer. Then they blocked the apps that made finding Pokemons easy and all the people were gone in less than a week. I was baffled how they managed to destroy a global phenomenon in such a short amount of time. But, yes, I remember, a few years ago, I met a buch of people who still played it, but they seemed to be Pokemon fans and not members of the public. So, it essentially became a regular Pokemon game played by the usual suspects, I guess. Which isn't bad, I mean, Pokemon is basically the MCU of games. But compared to the summer it came out...
- prmoustache 4y ago
  I am actually surprised to hear Pokemon Go is still on and there are still player. I thought it was a fad years ago tgat had gone extinct. I guess current players are now so ashamed they avoid talking about it or making it too obvious.
jmyeet 4y ago
The VC funding model just isn't appropriate for game studios. I'll go even further and extend that to any content business. Why? Because games specifically and content in general don't scale with how much money you have or spend. We've seen countless examples of this. Remember Angry Birds? Rovio took VC funding. How did that work out? Netflix arguably may have run itself into insolvency by overspending on original content to the point where it enters a death spiral of losing subscribers and raising subscription prices to compensate. Just because you create 1 successful game or TV show or movie doesn't mean that if someone hands you a large check you can't create 10 more just as successful. It doesn't even mean your organically successful original content will remain successful. Of course there are successful franchies in gaming (eg Call of Duty, Halo, Assassin's Creed). These may end up being worth something and do have an inbuilt audience so they scale better ut they still take significant work.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  How do you think Hollywood works, if not by taking a group of actors and directors and producers that previously made a successful film and giving them a bunch of money to do it again? Content absolutely does scale with budget--you can make 10,000 films that cost $10,000 to produce but they will never match the box office of a film that you spent $100M on. This should be obvious: you can't even afford to pay an actor with $10,000.
  - Parmenidea 4y ago
    Completely agree. I think the prevalence of sequels in Hollywood underscores the point; successful content begets popular content at a higher rate than a complete unknown.
    - majormajor 4y ago
      "Sequels" are the opposite of "just spend ten times as much money to make ten times more" - in that exponential-growth VC-model type strategy, you'd need to be spawning new franchises in parallel so you could have sequels to ALL of them at the same time, not just wait one by one. Sequels are "do the same thing again" not "be able to do more of them at once." For every MCU there's a Fantastic Four standalone or a Universal Monsters Universe or a Percy Jackson or a Golden Compass or Narnia or other never-to-be-finished would-be franchises... or even just a Star Wars: Solo on the "hmm this isn't paying off after all actually even if it's not a bomb" front. And those were all existing IP, even!
p1necone 4y ago
Pokemon Go was hugely popular, but basically making the same game with less popular brands/new IPs on top of them was never going to work. And that seems like all their other projects were. Phones still aren't really able to provide a proper immersive AR experience, there's only so much you can do with gamified Google maps.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  The funny thing is I still think of them as the Ingress company. Pokemon Go was just Ingress with a popular brand slapped on it, and that was enough to put it in the headlines again... once.
  - technonerd 4y ago
    pogo did a good job at killing ingress. Then niantic was like oops we forgot about you because you are the bastard child pokemon go is the gifted child. Lets rewrite the client from scratch but completely butcher it from both a UI and UX. Haven't touched it since they forced everyone to the prime client. I was heavily involved in both the local and national scene. They also made the larger events (anomalies) paid entry, it was free before.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      I haven't played Ingress since it was owned by Google. When I stopped allowing Location Services on my phone, Ingress went away with it, unsurprisingly. I did make a lot of friends back then, some of whom I still talk to today. It was definitely an interesting way to put you on an IRL collision course with other people of similar tech interests.
    - rubicon33 4y ago
      Wouldn't be surprised if they butchered it by using react native honestly. They're a skilled team but a lot of the problems I've heard of sound like hybrid dev. issues.
    - blhack 4y ago
daveoc64 4y ago
They are desperate to dominate the AR market, but without the Pokémon IP they would have nothing.
- jmcgough 4y ago
  They were doing fine without it, but Pokemon Go completely changed their trajectory as a company - just a huge influx of cash.
  - RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
    Definitely not a huge influx of original ideas, though.
pizzathyme 4y ago
This company has never been able to move on from being the Pokemon Go company, and they never will. I applaud them for their AR vision but unfortunately for all of us they got lucky with PGo and can’t replicate. And a string of hits is prerequisite to being able to pull of an AR platform like they dream of.
- Pulcinella 4y ago
  Honestly it’s not even an AR game (unless you count GPS location based gaming as AR). Anyone who plays PoGo turns off the AR mode after about 5 minutes and only turns it on for taking pictures of their Pokémon running around the park/house/pool/etc. Despite what Niantic thinks, they don’t really have much of an AR vision besides reskinning Ingress/Pokémon Go. They aren’t an AR company, they are a “makes money with a license for the insanely popular Pokemon franchise” company.
  - whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    This is more a case that AR fundamentally sucks through a phone screen. If Apple manage to ship their glasses the AR stuff will actually make sense, until then AR features on phones are just a prototyping tool.
    - cykros 4y ago
      Microsoft did it pretty well with Minecraft Earth, from a UX point of view anyway. From a "managing finite system resources" point of view, it was a spectacular failure, which is why the game failed. Even the top notch hardware was turned into a fast-dying hand warmer by that game.
- tootie 4y ago
  It was a clever gimmick but didn't really enhance the gameplay much beyond novelty. I think the fact that it's been 6 years and no one has topped it or even replicated it says that AR is just not happening. At least not on a phone.
feelandcoffee 4y ago
I still like Pokemon Go, but being honest at this point I used it more like a Fitness app rather than a pure video game. After the initial boom, I think the game become a form of "sports social network" IRL, thanks to the Raids. Sadly after COVID, a lot of the friends I hang out playing, just stop it, and the game didn't innovate enough to be still fun to play in house to a large base. So as much as I like the product, I find hard for Niantic to replicate the mainstream phenomena they had in 2016. I hope to be wrong, and they surprise with innovate like a AR wearable or a game with better mechanics. Sadly, I think those Layoffs are a reality check of the current state of their games.
- fy20 4y ago
  The raids for me were just meeting a bunch of geeks who you may recognise from last time, but nothing more, and looking at your phone for 5 minutes. They really could have emphasised the social aspects a lot more, but I guess it's tricky when a lot of your customer base is kids...
perardi 4y ago
I will admit to only playing Pokémon Go, and nothing else in their portfolio. And I finally gave up on Go about 6 months ago, after playing since 2016. (Maybe they made some amazing updates since then, and my points here are totally invalid…) But what an extremely mismanaged product. Extremely buggy, extremely slow development, and extremely over-hyped AR features. Niantic was very slow in fixing any issues with the core game loop, and they basically never fixed issues with the later features, namely Battle League. I don’t even know where to start with the issues…opaque errors, location problems, low frame-rates, awful connectivity for Bluetooth accessories, buggy “Adventure Sync”, poor communications with users about issues or UI problems… I played forever because of my perpetual love for Pokémon, and because it helped me connect with neighbors. Not that Niantic helped in any way at all there—community building was totally ad-hoc, via Facebook groups, or Facebook group chats, or Discord, or WhatsApp. But the entire time, I knew I was playing in a rickety house that was going to fall down at any moment. And it’s just not a surprise that house is starting to fall down. (I just sort of drifted away, when my new dog demanded much more attention than my old fella. Turns out a year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever has a lot of energy, versus a 9-year-old Lab…)
- acalzycalzy 4y ago
- nijave 4y ago
  It seems they ignore anything that isn't directly monetizable
- cjensen 4y ago
  Your points about AR are worth emphasizing: Pokemon Go has AR... that most users turn off. With AR turned off, it's strictly a location-based game.
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    Frankly I’d have turned it the location based aspect too if I could have. I don’t want to go places to play a video game, I just want to play it wherever I am. Obviously that wasn’t the point of the game, but it turned me off to the game after a few days. Never mind how repetitive it was.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Same old story of a company overraising its expectations for future revenue/success after a freak hit, only to be brought painfully back down to earth
tbrownaw 4y ago
-- ---- ---- \/ | | | | / \ / ---- / \/ | \ \ | /| | /| --- |/ | |/ | | \ Hm. Not sure hex grids translate to ascii-art so well.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  looks like...unknowns hieroglyphics?
  - RugnirViking 4y ago
    it's glyphs from Ingress, niantics first game, imo lesser-known but far superior. it's coming up on it's 10th aniversary and imo still going relatively strong with a dedicated playerbase.
- aneeshnl 4y ago
  Resistance or Enlightenment ?
  - tbrownaw 4y ago
    ;)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- max-m 4y ago
  The first five are quite readable, but I had problems to decipher the last one. In the end I think I got them all :) Together Human Strong Separate Weak Failure
xwdv 4y ago
They should have taken some of that Pokémon Go venture capital to rent out some real life locations that could be Pokémon themed and used as places where players could gather for monetizable events somehow. Exclusive content and community building.
- toxicFork 4y ago
  I don't know how much they can stretch the license
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Didn't seem to be able to stretch to anything more of an actual ... game.
- rexf 4y ago
  They are constantly running Pokemon Go fests. Berlin just wrapped up and Seattle is later this month https://pokemongolive.com/en/events/gofest-2022-seattle/ https://pokemongolive.com/en/events/gofest-2022-seattle/ These are ticketed (monetized), location specific events for players.
lostgame 4y ago
Imagine that a company who created a game that was clearly a massive fad that stopped growing years ago, was unable to sustain that unrealistic growth. It’s almost like it’s important to make business decisions off long term expectations, not short term miracles. But then again, these are educated businesspeople who would know better than me…right? :P
AlbertCory 4y ago
My connection with this is just that I was in Google Maps, and I knew some of the people who worked on Ingress. At the time, a "location-based game" seemed like a brilliant idea. I guess the novelty wore off. The Angry Birds analogy is spot on. A game is just a fad, unless you manage to turn it into a franchise. The best financial model, if you have a successful fad, is "take the money and run." You just won the lottery, which tells us nothing about your innate ability to win lotteries.
- Tepix 4y ago
  I think Niantic is struggling because they go the franchise route. They have few new ideas for their games, it's just mostly a new skin. But i haven't really tried the Harry Potter game and Pikmin Bloom so maybe i am wrong.
  - kongolongo 4y ago
    The Harry Potter game was a little bit more complicated, I think PoGo was probably the simplest, at least at launch, I'm not sure what its like now, and other than being a super well-known IP is partially why it was successful IMO. I guess you could probably point to that also being one reason why the HP game wasn't as successful despite also being a popular IP. I haven't tried Pikmin Bloom.
- yomkippur 4y ago
  Great pitch for VCs with some McKinsey research bubble charts with TAM in the billions with location based ups-LET ME WRITE A CHEC
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    No, McKinsey would figure out that you really, really want to keep winning the lottery, and come up with some slides that show you how. And then send you a big bill.
- malkuth23 4y ago
  The novelty of location based games never wore off for me, but the gameplay created by Niantic lost it's charm very quickly. I hope Naiantic's failure will not doom location based gaming. I suffered through the meaningless grind of Pokemon GO for longer than I expected because I loved the human and exploring elements so much. Niantic stumbled on a brilliant idea and completely failed to make an engaging game. It is hard for me to exaggerate how good I think locations based games are and how bad Niantic is at making games. There are so many possibilities in this space. I encourage any game maker interested to continue developing it. Maybe something that tells a story or solve a puzzle rather than just collect crap.
Animats 4y ago
That's too bad. They seemed to be on the right track, actually doing what Magic Leap faked. Niantic could actually make AR fun. Fun in this space is hard. Go log into one of the crypto metaverses.
aneeshnl 4y ago
Remembering my Ingress days. It was the best. Was able to travel and meet a lot of people. Great community. They were not able to keep my interest. I was a key player in South India.
- cykros 4y ago
  I picked it back up the other day ultimately thanks to this thread and remembering how much better things were in their early days, and am giving it another go, as I ultimately put it down giving their later offerings a shot. They've added in Adventure Sync, which, in conjunction with Quantum Capsules, is something I've been after for awhile, particularly now that I no longer live in a city (it lets you dupe items you already have based on walking distances...very handy if you're not in an area where there are people to easily come together to make P8 farms). Even with fewer players around I instantly got sucked into some adversarial shenanigans with another player or two in town, which was always the fun of the game in the first place. Niantic would do well to remember its roots.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
alasdair_ 4y ago
Niantic’s big play is having a really good 3d map of the world’s most interesting locations once Meta and Apple launch their AR glasses next year. It’s not a games studio, not really.
- cykros 4y ago
  I was shocked and appalled when they killed Field Trip, honestly. It's the forgotten Niantic app, but was a big part of what built that map and POI database in the first place, and was something I at least occasionally fired up when in a new area with some time to kill (waiting for hotel check ins). Monetizing it could have been tough given that so many of the POI's are just things like plaques and statues, but a slight tweaking of criteria could have EASILY given them some ability to have sponsored content. I suspect it was just a matter of diverting resources to other projects. Frankly I'd say it was still at least their third best project yet.
josephcsible 4y ago
This is exactly what Niantic deserves for their long-running war against rooted phones.
t_mann 4y ago
It still pains me to think what a disappointment and missed opportunity Pokemon Go was imho. I don't get it why they ditched the signature Pokemon fighting system for something pretty arbitrary, and so many other strange decisions that only make sense if you know that they also built Ingress and probably approached Pokemon Go as another iteration of that instead of building on the - extremely well established - Pokemon games.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  It was a disappointment for you maybe. It was a huge success and appealed to people outside the typical video game audience. You don’t get that by rehashing a 25 year old Game Boy game again.
  - t_mann 4y ago
    I don't deny that Pokemon Go was a huge success and that it has a lot of players who love it for what it is. I just wish somebody was still going to build an actual location-based Pokemon game.
    - rexf 4y ago
      Could Niantic do a better job? Yes > I just wish somebody was still going to build an actual location-based Pokemon game. Pokemon Go is absolutely a "location-based Pokemon game" today. The mechanics are simplified from the mainline console games, but it's definitely location-based Pokemon.
      - t_mann 4y ago
        The core mechanics of Pokemon are arguably the battles and catch'em'all. Pokemon Go is only a Pokemon game if you don't consider battles a core mechanic. The battle system in Pokemon Go had nothing to do with the Pokemon battle system, and not much strategy or tactics to it at all. There was no need to simplify the battles, they were already as simple as it gets: select a Pokemon, select an attack, watch the result. Easy to learn, some tactical depth, works on mobile, accessible for all ages -> no need for changes. I'd say that the Pokemon Go battles were actually no simpler, they just lacked any depth and were less accessible.
m3kw9 4y ago
They were banking AR would be mass adopted, but that’s waaays away and they totally depended on to apple come out with them.
- cykros 4y ago
  No, they depended on Google Glass coming out with them -- which they were about to, back when Ingress was still in Beta. Glass flopped, and Niantic floundered, but got a new lease on life thanks to the April Fool's Joke that was Pokemon Go.
eternityforest 4y ago
Covid pretty much killed any interest I had. I used to play PoGo with my LARP friends at our weekly game.... it's a lot less fun when everyone only goes anywhere by themselves. Plus, the game itself is way too simple, and very much time-oriented, you have to be free at the right time to make the events.. I think Niantic type games would be better if they were closer to World of Warcraft in terms of game mechanics, more guild focused, more complex mechanics, etc. It's probably held back a bit by the fact that they use real location data, and it's played by kids, and there are bad people who might do bad things with that if they aren't very careful, so they probably will always have to heavily limit some of the social features. The bugginess is pretty extreme though. It's just Google maps plus a Nintendo DS era game, why is it so buggy, and why is it so intolerant of when you run out of high speed data?
- idrios 4y ago
  I was about to make a WoW-related comment but because you brought it up I'm going to piggy back off yours. Pokemon Go battles are just boring. PvP is a combination of reflexes and rock-paper-scissors. When WoW introduced pet battles it was a very obvious knockoff of Pokemon, but it was still actually pretty fun. PVE scenarios like the Celestial Tournament (their version of the Elite 4) could be really challenging and take a lot of planning, where you'd need to go out searching for the right combination of battle pets to win, or maybe just experiment with what you have to make it work. PvP was pretty balanced -- there were still combinations that were overpowered at times but in general what mattered more was the combinations of battle pets because of their diverse movements, where one might be for applying debuffs and another is for doing multi-attacks. In Pokemon Go pvp is just "what's your counter pokemon to bastiodon / alteria / skarmory / azumarill / galarian skunfisk / etc" and then trying to fake out your opponent by baiting shields or being clever in how you swap pokemon. It's not the worst model but it bothers me how much more fun WoW Pet Battles are when Pokemon was the source material on how it should work.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    I know nothing about Pokemon, being old. But Ingress is a 2d game rather than the 0d game of Pokemon Go. Geometry matters as you link locations together
tinco 4y ago
Niantic is the most baffling company. I played the original ingress beta with my friends and it was actually pretty fun, it felt like you were playing a tech demo, but for a tech demo it was engrossing. When they shut it down and announced they started developing a game based on the pokemon IP that was pretty exciting, but the final product they released was frankly embarassing. I know the "I could build a this in a weekend" trope is ridiculous, but from my memory it felt that after over a year of developing (and shutting down a successful game for that amount of time!) they released what was basically a reskin of Ingress with less engrossing gameplay. But the bafflement continued after that. Despite the bareness of the game it still had great success, except they failed to monetize it in any significant way, by the time they implemented half decent monetization their player base had already dropped by a factor hundred or something. Of course given the ludicrous amount of initial hype that meant there was still an insane amount of players and they still made crazy revenue. And judging from the stories of players who remained active their development pace never really picked up. I'd love to read war stories from those layed off. What happened inside that company that made it have such a seemingly weak game development pace despite being born from one of the worlds premier engineering firms. Was all of it spent on marketing and licensing the IP? Or spent on frivolous decoration like the fancy AR experience that mostly fizzled out? All things considered the game was still a great success, just baffling when imagining the things that could have been. In my mind they could have been bigger than Nintendo itself.
- donalhunt 4y ago
  Ingress is still going… They did switch the game to the same engine as Pokémon Go which frustrated some players because they preferred the aesthetics of the old UI.
  - greyman 4y ago
    Thats true, I was one of them. Ingress was a great game, and it was also kind of useful when I was in some new city, I could look where the portals are, and in many cases those were the interesting places to visit. Anyway, I somehow couldnt get used to the new client, and over time stopped playing. Another thing is, that after experiencing Ingress, I kind of stopped believing in the "augmented reality" concept. The reality was augmented in one sense, but I noticed that when I focused on playing, I didnt notice some other things in the environment. My brain just didn't have enough capacity to perceive all the reality as it would normally do and also those augmented objects. It was more like a replacing.
alacrau 4y ago
Pokémon Go served a purpose, and it was not indeed to be neither a “game” nor excel in “AR”. Niantic’s (an Alphabet company) founder John Hanke (Google Earth, Google Maps, Street View…) achieved with Pokémon Go the most relevant production proof of concept that besides creating predictive products based on the “behavioural surplus” they could in fact, and globally, increase the effectiveness by simply herding people into bars, McDonald’s restaurants, shops and transforming the predictions into an actual increase of outcome. Users where instrumented into a predictable outcome. With this Niantic in my opinion serves a greater and historical purpose: to demonstrate that this behaviourist approach to generate predictable results and monetise it was possible at a global scale. It was surveillance capitalism at its prime.
theptip 4y ago
It’s a shame; I think their Lightship platform sounds pretty interesting, if it can accelerate AR game implementation. https://lightship.dev/ https://lightship.dev/ Having said that, none of their recent game ideas sound promising to me, except perhaps Harry Potter. I think to do as well as Pokémon you need to come up with a concept that is interesting (or flavorful) enough for folks to weave into their daily routine. Even Harry Potter might be a bad fit as IMO it has a really weak magic system (mechanically speaking). I suspect more successful would be a world with an interesting hard magic system with complex mechanics, plus compelling flavor like Harry Potter is so good at. Personally I think Cultist Simulator would be a good fit, since it has compelling recipe-progression and has great flavor that could be woven into the real world. Maybe Stranger Things, with the AR being a window into the Upside Down? I wonder if there is a way to weave Eve Online into an AR experience where people could contribute resources to corporations & participate in territorial struggles. Interested to hear other folks’ ideas for compelling AR experiences.
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  To me it’s mostly the mismatch between the world the player can interact with via the phone and the world they’re actually embodied in. Particularly for location-based or social games. It’s like going to a murder mystery weekend but everyone playing the actual game on their phone in a hotel room. These games need to lift the play off the screen. More LARP less AR. At least until AR is actually in glasses, in a shared consistent virtual space and not totally naff. The screen is then there to act as our screens do now, a way to access and record information but about the game specifically.
  - theptip 4y ago
    Yes, that is a good point. Perhaps more interaction could be fostered by giving each player only part of the solution, so you MUST collaborate. Murder mystery is a good one because you could have different clues visible to different players. (Perhaps your class enables you to decode certain clue types.) One mechanic I thought of for AR Cultist Simulator is to have a “be afraid to share” mechanic where you need to share with somebody in order to unlock recipes/solve challenges, but if you share widely you can be exploited. This could prevent folks from putting up FAQs revealing the solution to a given puzzle, and could provide a great tension and source of drama like Eve Online. Anyway I think your idea for AR parlor games is a good one, that could be a very fruitful avenue. You could have a DM/host set up the clues within a house and let the rest play the game, or even have everyone scan the house and somehow randomly do the setup.
artdigital 4y ago
My experience with Ingress was great when it came out. It made me go out, socialize, meet new people. Stuff like teaming up to hack portals and build ridiculous big triangles that span cities or even continents sometimes needed coordination and was so rewarding when we pulled it off. But it also felt they didn’t know what to do with Ingress. At some point the max level got hiked up to increase the grind and that was roughly when I stopped Pokémon Go on the other hand felt much less complex and lost me personally as a player after a couple days
mkl95 4y ago
IGN redirects you to a translated site based on your location, which is pretty unpleasant. Please give all your users the choice to read the original article.
Tepix 4y ago
I have the feeling the potential of location based game genre remains largely untapped. Perhaps we need cool AR glasses to really achieve a breakthrough. These games could be extremely competitive! Remember foursquare at its peak? On the other hand the tech to turn 2d images or videos into 3d scenes is advancing very quickly and enables a lot of really cool things you could do in-game.
langsoul-com 4y ago
Don't think any other similar ar app would be popular. Pokemon GO was pretty unique to the masses, anything similar afterwards is common place.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Really common occurrence with companies that find success by partnering with an IP they don't own. They find success, then they try another spin of the wheel spreading out to another IP they don't own, convincing themselves that just because that IP has as much or even greater reach that the same thing will be replicated again and that the road to success is just capturing more and more markets by working with more IPs. By the time their second partnership product is out, which probably was a lot more expensive to develop than the first, they probably already have a 3rd in the pipeline. Often this second product is received much worse than the first and the hope that "Harry Potter's market is X big compared to Pokemon so we're due to have a revenue of X from it" is completely crushed and the product is a fraction of the success of the last, this is where things start to go pear shaped, many companies at this point make the mistake of doubling down on even more IP partnership products to try and build up the revenue but the returns are all diminishing and at the end of the day you don't truly own your products and are stuck paying out large percentages to IP holders. I worked in a startup in a field where every single one of our competitors and the company I worked at fell into this trap and maybe 1/4th made it out the other side. I see they may have now figured out its a bad idea but only after what seems like 7 spins of the wheel (Pokemon, Harry Potter, Minecraft, Catan, Transformers, Pikmin, NBA) with diminishing returns. Because now they're developing their own IP which looks to be a Pokemon clone. This wont work out either really because their main customer base are not with them because they're Niantic, they're with them because of Pokemon so bootleg pokemon wont cut it. Now as a thought exercise lets imagine if all those years ago they hadn't thought "Let's bring the Pokemon IP to the real world and smartphones and piggyback to success off it" and instead thought "Nintendo hasn't seen the potential of a Pokemon smartphone GPS game and have no presence on these platforms. Let's build the game that will be Pokemon for the next generation with this first mover advantage" and had Peridot as their second game, not their 10th". Might not have done the numbers Pokemon Go did, but they'd own it completely, own the merchandising rights to it completely and over time you'd have a generation who grew up thinking "Pokemon? oh that's like Peridot isn't it"
- Semaphor 4y ago
  I hope that doesn’t happen with Owlcat. Their first two games were based on the Pathfinder TTRPG, their 3rd game will be based on the WH40k Rogue Trader TTRPG. But then both those IPs are probably crazy cheap to develop for in comparison to Pokémon.
grumple 4y ago
Niantic and Pokemon Go are one of the biggest examples of fumbling the bag and missing the mark. What people really want is a truly open world Pokemon game. Where you can train pokemon, battle strangers, win prizes. Pokemon Go had the open world, random Pokemon appearing, even an interesting capture mechanic... but no battling, no training, no story, too many microtransactions for little benefit. It could have been so much more and so much better. Nintendo's closest to this was Sword and Shield, but I'm not sure Nintendo has the internal will to really take Pokemon to that next level of WoW-like open world content.
- aiilns 4y ago
  It's because Pokémon Go was a product designed for manipulating people. One of the first attempts at mass behavioral modification. Most Google products make sense when you think in data extraction terms & behavioral modification. Its products must either gather data from the users, use that data for better manipulating (personalized ads, "ads" for bars in the case of Go etc) or facilitate those two functions. That's Google's business, not game development. And from that point of view, Pokémon Go was a huge success.
  - cykros 4y ago
    One need only look to the lore of Ingress to see the real aims here. Niantic, or, the NIA, has always had intel and manipulation in mind (you could almost say they aspire to be "shapers").
alerter 4y ago
The original Pokémon games were deep and interesting RPGs that could nevertheless be played by children. They were hugely successful because they were genuinely well crafted games. Niantic gutted mechanical complexity in the name of accessibility and monetisation. It feels like mobile studios in general just don’t have the culture, desire or market incentives to produce products that are compelling on their own merits. Everything has to be a Skinner box with only a handful of interactions. I know Pokémon Go was a successful fad, but I still see it as a missed opportunity.
- TillE 4y ago
  Pokemon is definitely a simplified JRPG for children. But yes, it's still far more interesting than the mobile game, and there's no good reason why that has to be the case.
cykros 4y ago
Take the gloves off, make a cyberpunk game. C'mon; who doesn't want to run around down dark alleys in the middle of the night to do sketchy missions, and jack their deck into a megacorp's system to fight off some ICE? But yes, I imagine no amount of disclaimers would save them from the damages caused by people doing outright stupid things.

235 points by lxm 4y ago

k__ 4y ago

I'm surprised they survived that long after Pokemon Go.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
After? I'm the opposite, how can they fail with a game that reportedly [0] took $1.21B in revenue last year (well past its zenith, as you point out) and by its nature it's fixed (doesn't need any development). It seems like it's going to be 200:1 profits to expenditure with those numbers. You've got to do things seriously badly to mess that up?? [0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/
- brutus1213 4y ago
  I picked up pogo after a few years. They actually seem to be doing quite a bit of development .. lots of locale specific events, weather warnings, more than 151 pokemon, raids, etc. I'm pretty impressed.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Huh, I went back to it after almost 6 years (first played it when it came out, then after a couple of weeks they changed the app and it wouldn't run on my phone any more) and it seemed almost identical to me. Yes, some more automated events, the integration of weather, but nothing else noticeably different (?) [to me, as yet].
- k__ 4y ago
  Interesting! I played it when it came out, and it was awesome. Many people where on the streets, best summer. Then they blocked the apps that made finding Pokemons easy and all the people were gone in less than a week. I was baffled how they managed to destroy a global phenomenon in such a short amount of time. But, yes, I remember, a few years ago, I met a buch of people who still played it, but they seemed to be Pokemon fans and not members of the public. So, it essentially became a regular Pokemon game played by the usual suspects, I guess. Which isn't bad, I mean, Pokemon is basically the MCU of games. But compared to the summer it came out...
prmoustache 4y ago
I am actually surprised to hear Pokemon Go is still on and there are still player. I thought it was a fad years ago tgat had gone extinct. I guess current players are now so ashamed they avoid talking about it or making it too obvious.

jmyeet 4y ago

The VC funding model just isn't appropriate for game studios. I'll go even further and extend that to any content business. Why? Because games specifically and content in general don't scale with how much money you have or spend. We've seen countless examples of this. Remember Angry Birds? Rovio took VC funding. How did that work out? Netflix arguably may have run itself into insolvency by overspending on original content to the point where it enters a death spiral of losing subscribers and raising subscription prices to compensate. Just because you create 1 successful game or TV show or movie doesn't mean that if someone hands you a large check you can't create 10 more just as successful. It doesn't even mean your organically successful original content will remain successful. Of course there are successful franchies in gaming (eg Call of Duty, Halo, Assassin's Creed). These may end up being worth something and do have an inbuilt audience so they scale better ut they still take significant work.

Invictus0 4y ago
How do you think Hollywood works, if not by taking a group of actors and directors and producers that previously made a successful film and giving them a bunch of money to do it again? Content absolutely does scale with budget--you can make 10,000 films that cost $10,000 to produce but they will never match the box office of a film that you spent $100M on. This should be obvious: you can't even afford to pay an actor with $10,000.
- Parmenidea 4y ago
  Completely agree. I think the prevalence of sequels in Hollywood underscores the point; successful content begets popular content at a higher rate than a complete unknown.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    "Sequels" are the opposite of "just spend ten times as much money to make ten times more" - in that exponential-growth VC-model type strategy, you'd need to be spawning new franchises in parallel so you could have sequels to ALL of them at the same time, not just wait one by one. Sequels are "do the same thing again" not "be able to do more of them at once." For every MCU there's a Fantastic Four standalone or a Universal Monsters Universe or a Percy Jackson or a Golden Compass or Narnia or other never-to-be-finished would-be franchises... or even just a Star Wars: Solo on the "hmm this isn't paying off after all actually even if it's not a bomb" front. And those were all existing IP, even!

p1necone 4y ago

Pokemon Go was hugely popular, but basically making the same game with less popular brands/new IPs on top of them was never going to work. And that seems like all their other projects were. Phones still aren't really able to provide a proper immersive AR experience, there's only so much you can do with gamified Google maps.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
The funny thing is I still think of them as the Ingress company. Pokemon Go was just Ingress with a popular brand slapped on it, and that was enough to put it in the headlines again... once.
- technonerd 4y ago
  pogo did a good job at killing ingress. Then niantic was like oops we forgot about you because you are the bastard child pokemon go is the gifted child. Lets rewrite the client from scratch but completely butcher it from both a UI and UX. Haven't touched it since they forced everyone to the prime client. I was heavily involved in both the local and national scene. They also made the larger events (anomalies) paid entry, it was free before.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    I haven't played Ingress since it was owned by Google. When I stopped allowing Location Services on my phone, Ingress went away with it, unsurprisingly. I did make a lot of friends back then, some of whom I still talk to today. It was definitely an interesting way to put you on an IRL collision course with other people of similar tech interests.
  - rubicon33 4y ago
    Wouldn't be surprised if they butchered it by using react native honestly. They're a skilled team but a lot of the problems I've heard of sound like hybrid dev. issues.
  - blhack 4y ago

daveoc64 4y ago

They are desperate to dominate the AR market, but without the Pokémon IP they would have nothing.

jmcgough 4y ago
They were doing fine without it, but Pokemon Go completely changed their trajectory as a company - just a huge influx of cash.
- RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
  Definitely not a huge influx of original ideas, though.

pizzathyme 4y ago

This company has never been able to move on from being the Pokemon Go company, and they never will. I applaud them for their AR vision but unfortunately for all of us they got lucky with PGo and can’t replicate. And a string of hits is prerequisite to being able to pull of an AR platform like they dream of.

Pulcinella 4y ago
Honestly it’s not even an AR game (unless you count GPS location based gaming as AR). Anyone who plays PoGo turns off the AR mode after about 5 minutes and only turns it on for taking pictures of their Pokémon running around the park/house/pool/etc. Despite what Niantic thinks, they don’t really have much of an AR vision besides reskinning Ingress/Pokémon Go. They aren’t an AR company, they are a “makes money with a license for the insanely popular Pokemon franchise” company.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  This is more a case that AR fundamentally sucks through a phone screen. If Apple manage to ship their glasses the AR stuff will actually make sense, until then AR features on phones are just a prototyping tool.
  - cykros 4y ago
    Microsoft did it pretty well with Minecraft Earth, from a UX point of view anyway. From a "managing finite system resources" point of view, it was a spectacular failure, which is why the game failed. Even the top notch hardware was turned into a fast-dying hand warmer by that game.
tootie 4y ago
It was a clever gimmick but didn't really enhance the gameplay much beyond novelty. I think the fact that it's been 6 years and no one has topped it or even replicated it says that AR is just not happening. At least not on a phone.

feelandcoffee 4y ago

I still like Pokemon Go, but being honest at this point I used it more like a Fitness app rather than a pure video game. After the initial boom, I think the game become a form of "sports social network" IRL, thanks to the Raids. Sadly after COVID, a lot of the friends I hang out playing, just stop it, and the game didn't innovate enough to be still fun to play in house to a large base. So as much as I like the product, I find hard for Niantic to replicate the mainstream phenomena they had in 2016. I hope to be wrong, and they surprise with innovate like a AR wearable or a game with better mechanics. Sadly, I think those Layoffs are a reality check of the current state of their games.

fy20 4y ago
The raids for me were just meeting a bunch of geeks who you may recognise from last time, but nothing more, and looking at your phone for 5 minutes. They really could have emphasised the social aspects a lot more, but I guess it's tricky when a lot of your customer base is kids...

perardi 4y ago

I will admit to only playing Pokémon Go, and nothing else in their portfolio. And I finally gave up on Go about 6 months ago, after playing since 2016. (Maybe they made some amazing updates since then, and my points here are totally invalid…) But what an extremely mismanaged product. Extremely buggy, extremely slow development, and extremely over-hyped AR features. Niantic was very slow in fixing any issues with the core game loop, and they basically never fixed issues with the later features, namely Battle League. I don’t even know where to start with the issues…opaque errors, location problems, low frame-rates, awful connectivity for Bluetooth accessories, buggy “Adventure Sync”, poor communications with users about issues or UI problems… I played forever because of my perpetual love for Pokémon, and because it helped me connect with neighbors. Not that Niantic helped in any way at all there—community building was totally ad-hoc, via Facebook groups, or Facebook group chats, or Discord, or WhatsApp. But the entire time, I knew I was playing in a rickety house that was going to fall down at any moment. And it’s just not a surprise that house is starting to fall down. (I just sort of drifted away, when my new dog demanded much more attention than my old fella. Turns out a year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever has a lot of energy, versus a 9-year-old Lab…)

acalzycalzy 4y ago
nijave 4y ago
It seems they ignore anything that isn't directly monetizable
cjensen 4y ago
Your points about AR are worth emphasizing: Pokemon Go has AR... that most users turn off. With AR turned off, it's strictly a location-based game.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  Frankly I’d have turned it the location based aspect too if I could have. I don’t want to go places to play a video game, I just want to play it wherever I am. Obviously that wasn’t the point of the game, but it turned me off to the game after a few days. Never mind how repetitive it was.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Same old story of a company overraising its expectations for future revenue/success after a freak hit, only to be brought painfully back down to earth

tbrownaw 4y ago

-- ---- ---- \/ | | | | / \ / ---- / \/ | \ \ | /| | /| --- |/ | |/ | | \ Hm. Not sure hex grids translate to ascii-art so well.

Ancalagon 4y ago
looks like...unknowns hieroglyphics?
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  it's glyphs from Ingress, niantics first game, imo lesser-known but far superior. it's coming up on it's 10th aniversary and imo still going relatively strong with a dedicated playerbase.
aneeshnl 4y ago
Resistance or Enlightenment ?
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  ;)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
max-m 4y ago
The first five are quite readable, but I had problems to decipher the last one. In the end I think I got them all :) Together Human Strong Separate Weak Failure

xwdv 4y ago

They should have taken some of that Pokémon Go venture capital to rent out some real life locations that could be Pokémon themed and used as places where players could gather for monetizable events somehow. Exclusive content and community building.

toxicFork 4y ago
I don't know how much they can stretch the license
- bombcar 4y ago
  Didn't seem to be able to stretch to anything more of an actual ... game.
rexf 4y ago
They are constantly running Pokemon Go fests. Berlin just wrapped up and Seattle is later this month https://pokemongolive.com/en/events/gofest-2022-seattle/ https://pokemongolive.com/en/events/gofest-2022-seattle/ These are ticketed (monetized), location specific events for players.

lostgame 4y ago

Imagine that a company who created a game that was clearly a massive fad that stopped growing years ago, was unable to sustain that unrealistic growth. It’s almost like it’s important to make business decisions off long term expectations, not short term miracles. But then again, these are educated businesspeople who would know better than me…right? :P

AlbertCory 4y ago

My connection with this is just that I was in Google Maps, and I knew some of the people who worked on Ingress. At the time, a "location-based game" seemed like a brilliant idea. I guess the novelty wore off. The Angry Birds analogy is spot on. A game is just a fad, unless you manage to turn it into a franchise. The best financial model, if you have a successful fad, is "take the money and run." You just won the lottery, which tells us nothing about your innate ability to win lotteries.

Tepix 4y ago
I think Niantic is struggling because they go the franchise route. They have few new ideas for their games, it's just mostly a new skin. But i haven't really tried the Harry Potter game and Pikmin Bloom so maybe i am wrong.
- kongolongo 4y ago
  The Harry Potter game was a little bit more complicated, I think PoGo was probably the simplest, at least at launch, I'm not sure what its like now, and other than being a super well-known IP is partially why it was successful IMO. I guess you could probably point to that also being one reason why the HP game wasn't as successful despite also being a popular IP. I haven't tried Pikmin Bloom.
yomkippur 4y ago
Great pitch for VCs with some McKinsey research bubble charts with TAM in the billions with location based ups-LET ME WRITE A CHEC
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  No, McKinsey would figure out that you really, really want to keep winning the lottery, and come up with some slides that show you how. And then send you a big bill.
malkuth23 4y ago
The novelty of location based games never wore off for me, but the gameplay created by Niantic lost it's charm very quickly. I hope Naiantic's failure will not doom location based gaming. I suffered through the meaningless grind of Pokemon GO for longer than I expected because I loved the human and exploring elements so much. Niantic stumbled on a brilliant idea and completely failed to make an engaging game. It is hard for me to exaggerate how good I think locations based games are and how bad Niantic is at making games. There are so many possibilities in this space. I encourage any game maker interested to continue developing it. Maybe something that tells a story or solve a puzzle rather than just collect crap.

Animats 4y ago

That's too bad. They seemed to be on the right track, actually doing what Magic Leap faked. Niantic could actually make AR fun. Fun in this space is hard. Go log into one of the crypto metaverses.

aneeshnl 4y ago

Remembering my Ingress days. It was the best. Was able to travel and meet a lot of people. Great community. They were not able to keep my interest. I was a key player in South India.

cykros 4y ago
I picked it back up the other day ultimately thanks to this thread and remembering how much better things were in their early days, and am giving it another go, as I ultimately put it down giving their later offerings a shot. They've added in Adventure Sync, which, in conjunction with Quantum Capsules, is something I've been after for awhile, particularly now that I no longer live in a city (it lets you dupe items you already have based on walking distances...very handy if you're not in an area where there are people to easily come together to make P8 farms). Even with fewer players around I instantly got sucked into some adversarial shenanigans with another player or two in town, which was always the fun of the game in the first place. Niantic would do well to remember its roots.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

alasdair_ 4y ago

Niantic’s big play is having a really good 3d map of the world’s most interesting locations once Meta and Apple launch their AR glasses next year. It’s not a games studio, not really.

cykros 4y ago
I was shocked and appalled when they killed Field Trip, honestly. It's the forgotten Niantic app, but was a big part of what built that map and POI database in the first place, and was something I at least occasionally fired up when in a new area with some time to kill (waiting for hotel check ins). Monetizing it could have been tough given that so many of the POI's are just things like plaques and statues, but a slight tweaking of criteria could have EASILY given them some ability to have sponsored content. I suspect it was just a matter of diverting resources to other projects. Frankly I'd say it was still at least their third best project yet.

josephcsible 4y ago

This is exactly what Niantic deserves for their long-running war against rooted phones.

t_mann 4y ago

It still pains me to think what a disappointment and missed opportunity Pokemon Go was imho. I don't get it why they ditched the signature Pokemon fighting system for something pretty arbitrary, and so many other strange decisions that only make sense if you know that they also built Ingress and probably approached Pokemon Go as another iteration of that instead of building on the - extremely well established - Pokemon games.

vlunkr 4y ago
It was a disappointment for you maybe. It was a huge success and appealed to people outside the typical video game audience. You don’t get that by rehashing a 25 year old Game Boy game again.
- t_mann 4y ago
  I don't deny that Pokemon Go was a huge success and that it has a lot of players who love it for what it is. I just wish somebody was still going to build an actual location-based Pokemon game.
  - rexf 4y ago
    Could Niantic do a better job? Yes > I just wish somebody was still going to build an actual location-based Pokemon game. Pokemon Go is absolutely a "location-based Pokemon game" today. The mechanics are simplified from the mainline console games, but it's definitely location-based Pokemon.
    - t_mann 4y ago
      The core mechanics of Pokemon are arguably the battles and catch'em'all. Pokemon Go is only a Pokemon game if you don't consider battles a core mechanic. The battle system in Pokemon Go had nothing to do with the Pokemon battle system, and not much strategy or tactics to it at all. There was no need to simplify the battles, they were already as simple as it gets: select a Pokemon, select an attack, watch the result. Easy to learn, some tactical depth, works on mobile, accessible for all ages -> no need for changes. I'd say that the Pokemon Go battles were actually no simpler, they just lacked any depth and were less accessible.

m3kw9 4y ago

They were banking AR would be mass adopted, but that’s waaays away and they totally depended on to apple come out with them.

cykros 4y ago
No, they depended on Google Glass coming out with them -- which they were about to, back when Ingress was still in Beta. Glass flopped, and Niantic floundered, but got a new lease on life thanks to the April Fool's Joke that was Pokemon Go.

eternityforest 4y ago

Covid pretty much killed any interest I had. I used to play PoGo with my LARP friends at our weekly game.... it's a lot less fun when everyone only goes anywhere by themselves. Plus, the game itself is way too simple, and very much time-oriented, you have to be free at the right time to make the events.. I think Niantic type games would be better if they were closer to World of Warcraft in terms of game mechanics, more guild focused, more complex mechanics, etc. It's probably held back a bit by the fact that they use real location data, and it's played by kids, and there are bad people who might do bad things with that if they aren't very careful, so they probably will always have to heavily limit some of the social features. The bugginess is pretty extreme though. It's just Google maps plus a Nintendo DS era game, why is it so buggy, and why is it so intolerant of when you run out of high speed data?

idrios 4y ago
I was about to make a WoW-related comment but because you brought it up I'm going to piggy back off yours. Pokemon Go battles are just boring. PvP is a combination of reflexes and rock-paper-scissors. When WoW introduced pet battles it was a very obvious knockoff of Pokemon, but it was still actually pretty fun. PVE scenarios like the Celestial Tournament (their version of the Elite 4) could be really challenging and take a lot of planning, where you'd need to go out searching for the right combination of battle pets to win, or maybe just experiment with what you have to make it work. PvP was pretty balanced -- there were still combinations that were overpowered at times but in general what mattered more was the combinations of battle pets because of their diverse movements, where one might be for applying debuffs and another is for doing multi-attacks. In Pokemon Go pvp is just "what's your counter pokemon to bastiodon / alteria / skarmory / azumarill / galarian skunfisk / etc" and then trying to fake out your opponent by baiting shields or being clever in how you swap pokemon. It's not the worst model but it bothers me how much more fun WoW Pet Battles are when Pokemon was the source material on how it should work.
- mavhc 4y ago
  I know nothing about Pokemon, being old. But Ingress is a 2d game rather than the 0d game of Pokemon Go. Geometry matters as you link locations together

tinco 4y ago

Niantic is the most baffling company. I played the original ingress beta with my friends and it was actually pretty fun, it felt like you were playing a tech demo, but for a tech demo it was engrossing. When they shut it down and announced they started developing a game based on the pokemon IP that was pretty exciting, but the final product they released was frankly embarassing. I know the "I could build a this in a weekend" trope is ridiculous, but from my memory it felt that after over a year of developing (and shutting down a successful game for that amount of time!) they released what was basically a reskin of Ingress with less engrossing gameplay. But the bafflement continued after that. Despite the bareness of the game it still had great success, except they failed to monetize it in any significant way, by the time they implemented half decent monetization their player base had already dropped by a factor hundred or something. Of course given the ludicrous amount of initial hype that meant there was still an insane amount of players and they still made crazy revenue. And judging from the stories of players who remained active their development pace never really picked up. I'd love to read war stories from those layed off. What happened inside that company that made it have such a seemingly weak game development pace despite being born from one of the worlds premier engineering firms. Was all of it spent on marketing and licensing the IP? Or spent on frivolous decoration like the fancy AR experience that mostly fizzled out? All things considered the game was still a great success, just baffling when imagining the things that could have been. In my mind they could have been bigger than Nintendo itself.

donalhunt 4y ago
Ingress is still going… They did switch the game to the same engine as Pokémon Go which frustrated some players because they preferred the aesthetics of the old UI.
- greyman 4y ago
  Thats true, I was one of them. Ingress was a great game, and it was also kind of useful when I was in some new city, I could look where the portals are, and in many cases those were the interesting places to visit. Anyway, I somehow couldnt get used to the new client, and over time stopped playing. Another thing is, that after experiencing Ingress, I kind of stopped believing in the "augmented reality" concept. The reality was augmented in one sense, but I noticed that when I focused on playing, I didnt notice some other things in the environment. My brain just didn't have enough capacity to perceive all the reality as it would normally do and also those augmented objects. It was more like a replacing.

alacrau 4y ago

Pokémon Go served a purpose, and it was not indeed to be neither a “game” nor excel in “AR”. Niantic’s (an Alphabet company) founder John Hanke (Google Earth, Google Maps, Street View…) achieved with Pokémon Go the most relevant production proof of concept that besides creating predictive products based on the “behavioural surplus” they could in fact, and globally, increase the effectiveness by simply herding people into bars, McDonald’s restaurants, shops and transforming the predictions into an actual increase of outcome. Users where instrumented into a predictable outcome. With this Niantic in my opinion serves a greater and historical purpose: to demonstrate that this behaviourist approach to generate predictable results and monetise it was possible at a global scale. It was surveillance capitalism at its prime.

theptip 4y ago

It’s a shame; I think their Lightship platform sounds pretty interesting, if it can accelerate AR game implementation. https://lightship.dev/ https://lightship.dev/ Having said that, none of their recent game ideas sound promising to me, except perhaps Harry Potter. I think to do as well as Pokémon you need to come up with a concept that is interesting (or flavorful) enough for folks to weave into their daily routine. Even Harry Potter might be a bad fit as IMO it has a really weak magic system (mechanically speaking). I suspect more successful would be a world with an interesting hard magic system with complex mechanics, plus compelling flavor like Harry Potter is so good at. Personally I think Cultist Simulator would be a good fit, since it has compelling recipe-progression and has great flavor that could be woven into the real world. Maybe Stranger Things, with the AR being a window into the Upside Down? I wonder if there is a way to weave Eve Online into an AR experience where people could contribute resources to corporations & participate in territorial struggles. Interested to hear other folks’ ideas for compelling AR experiences.

meheleventyone 4y ago
To me it’s mostly the mismatch between the world the player can interact with via the phone and the world they’re actually embodied in. Particularly for location-based or social games. It’s like going to a murder mystery weekend but everyone playing the actual game on their phone in a hotel room. These games need to lift the play off the screen. More LARP less AR. At least until AR is actually in glasses, in a shared consistent virtual space and not totally naff. The screen is then there to act as our screens do now, a way to access and record information but about the game specifically.
- theptip 4y ago
  Yes, that is a good point. Perhaps more interaction could be fostered by giving each player only part of the solution, so you MUST collaborate. Murder mystery is a good one because you could have different clues visible to different players. (Perhaps your class enables you to decode certain clue types.) One mechanic I thought of for AR Cultist Simulator is to have a “be afraid to share” mechanic where you need to share with somebody in order to unlock recipes/solve challenges, but if you share widely you can be exploited. This could prevent folks from putting up FAQs revealing the solution to a given puzzle, and could provide a great tension and source of drama like Eve Online. Anyway I think your idea for AR parlor games is a good one, that could be a very fruitful avenue. You could have a DM/host set up the clues within a house and let the rest play the game, or even have everyone scan the house and somehow randomly do the setup.

artdigital 4y ago

My experience with Ingress was great when it came out. It made me go out, socialize, meet new people. Stuff like teaming up to hack portals and build ridiculous big triangles that span cities or even continents sometimes needed coordination and was so rewarding when we pulled it off. But it also felt they didn’t know what to do with Ingress. At some point the max level got hiked up to increase the grind and that was roughly when I stopped Pokémon Go on the other hand felt much less complex and lost me personally as a player after a couple days

mkl95 4y ago

IGN redirects you to a translated site based on your location, which is pretty unpleasant. Please give all your users the choice to read the original article.

Tepix 4y ago

I have the feeling the potential of location based game genre remains largely untapped. Perhaps we need cool AR glasses to really achieve a breakthrough. These games could be extremely competitive! Remember foursquare at its peak? On the other hand the tech to turn 2d images or videos into 3d scenes is advancing very quickly and enables a lot of really cool things you could do in-game.

langsoul-com 4y ago

Don't think any other similar ar app would be popular. Pokemon GO was pretty unique to the masses, anything similar afterwards is common place.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

Really common occurrence with companies that find success by partnering with an IP they don't own. They find success, then they try another spin of the wheel spreading out to another IP they don't own, convincing themselves that just because that IP has as much or even greater reach that the same thing will be replicated again and that the road to success is just capturing more and more markets by working with more IPs. By the time their second partnership product is out, which probably was a lot more expensive to develop than the first, they probably already have a 3rd in the pipeline. Often this second product is received much worse than the first and the hope that "Harry Potter's market is X big compared to Pokemon so we're due to have a revenue of X from it" is completely crushed and the product is a fraction of the success of the last, this is where things start to go pear shaped, many companies at this point make the mistake of doubling down on even more IP partnership products to try and build up the revenue but the returns are all diminishing and at the end of the day you don't truly own your products and are stuck paying out large percentages to IP holders. I worked in a startup in a field where every single one of our competitors and the company I worked at fell into this trap and maybe 1/4th made it out the other side. I see they may have now figured out its a bad idea but only after what seems like 7 spins of the wheel (Pokemon, Harry Potter, Minecraft, Catan, Transformers, Pikmin, NBA) with diminishing returns. Because now they're developing their own IP which looks to be a Pokemon clone. This wont work out either really because their main customer base are not with them because they're Niantic, they're with them because of Pokemon so bootleg pokemon wont cut it. Now as a thought exercise lets imagine if all those years ago they hadn't thought "Let's bring the Pokemon IP to the real world and smartphones and piggyback to success off it" and instead thought "Nintendo hasn't seen the potential of a Pokemon smartphone GPS game and have no presence on these platforms. Let's build the game that will be Pokemon for the next generation with this first mover advantage" and had Peridot as their second game, not their 10th". Might not have done the numbers Pokemon Go did, but they'd own it completely, own the merchandising rights to it completely and over time you'd have a generation who grew up thinking "Pokemon? oh that's like Peridot isn't it"

Semaphor 4y ago
I hope that doesn’t happen with Owlcat. Their first two games were based on the Pathfinder TTRPG, their 3rd game will be based on the WH40k Rogue Trader TTRPG. But then both those IPs are probably crazy cheap to develop for in comparison to Pokémon.

grumple 4y ago

Niantic and Pokemon Go are one of the biggest examples of fumbling the bag and missing the mark. What people really want is a truly open world Pokemon game. Where you can train pokemon, battle strangers, win prizes. Pokemon Go had the open world, random Pokemon appearing, even an interesting capture mechanic... but no battling, no training, no story, too many microtransactions for little benefit. It could have been so much more and so much better. Nintendo's closest to this was Sword and Shield, but I'm not sure Nintendo has the internal will to really take Pokemon to that next level of WoW-like open world content.

aiilns 4y ago
It's because Pokémon Go was a product designed for manipulating people. One of the first attempts at mass behavioral modification. Most Google products make sense when you think in data extraction terms & behavioral modification. Its products must either gather data from the users, use that data for better manipulating (personalized ads, "ads" for bars in the case of Go etc) or facilitate those two functions. That's Google's business, not game development. And from that point of view, Pokémon Go was a huge success.
- cykros 4y ago
  One need only look to the lore of Ingress to see the real aims here. Niantic, or, the NIA, has always had intel and manipulation in mind (you could almost say they aspire to be "shapers").

alerter 4y ago

The original Pokémon games were deep and interesting RPGs that could nevertheless be played by children. They were hugely successful because they were genuinely well crafted games. Niantic gutted mechanical complexity in the name of accessibility and monetisation. It feels like mobile studios in general just don’t have the culture, desire or market incentives to produce products that are compelling on their own merits. Everything has to be a Skinner box with only a handful of interactions. I know Pokémon Go was a successful fad, but I still see it as a missed opportunity.

TillE 4y ago
Pokemon is definitely a simplified JRPG for children. But yes, it's still far more interesting than the mobile game, and there's no good reason why that has to be the case.

cykros 4y ago

Take the gloves off, make a cyberpunk game. C'mon; who doesn't want to run around down dark alleys in the middle of the night to do sketchy missions, and jack their deck into a megacorp's system to fight off some ICE? But yes, I imagine no amount of disclaimers would save them from the damages caused by people doing outright stupid things.