Niantic undergoes layoffs, cancels four games

https://www.ign.com/articles/niantic-undergoes-layoffs-cancels-four-games-pokemon-go

by lxm • 4 years ago

235 194 4 years ago

ign.com

k__2• 4 years ago

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

pbhjpbhj2• 4 years 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/

brutus1213• 4 years 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.

k__2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

jmyeet3• 4 years 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.

Invictus02• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

majormajor5• 4 years ago

When's the last time Hollywood film studios 10x'd their revenue? Even looking at global box office, it increased from 23.1B in 2005 to 42.3B in 2019 pre-Covid.

That's not a growth rate that would attract a VC. Not a lot of new VC-founded studios, as a result. Would you count Quibi?

Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon, cable networks, and movies are all competing for a finite set of attention, and there are more other things competing for that attention than ever before too. Netflix has aggressively expanded to compete globally in a way US cable never did, but that still has a ceiling.

If you ten-x'd the amount of 200-million-budget films made in a year you'd similarly hit a wall. At a certain point all you're doing is raising the bar necessary to attract consumer attention, vs attracting new attention and dollars.

greggman3• 4 years ago

I don't think the holds. When Sony bought Columbia there's an apocryphal story of the USA executives explaining the business to the new Japanese owners and saying "We make 20 movies and only 1 is profitable". The Japanese executives talked to each other in Japanese and then replied "Please only make the 1 profitable movie". In other words, the mis-understood that the USA executives were trying to tell them they don't know which of the 20 movies is going to be a hit.

Going back to 2019 (so taking COVID out of the consideration), "Dark Phoenix" tanked, cost $200 million. "Gemini Man" tanked, cost $172 million. Plenty of 30-70 million dollar movies that didn't do well.

This page list 680 movies that came out, no list of budget but only around 1/6th made 10 million and I'm sure there's a long list of the ~500 that made less than 10 million that cost more than 10 million to make.

https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2019/top-grossing-movies

makeitdouble3• 4 years ago

Hollywood has a near infinite supply of original writers and source material to take from and adapt to film.

It could be argued that it’s less about creating content than transforming content (craft mastery and artistry is still required, but the concept is pretty different).

That’s also where I think Netflix isn’t that much in trouble based only on its business model.

But it doesn’t work with game creation. You can’t just transform source material (original or not), it needs completely different innovative elements.

To note, game franchises also exist, but while they are wildly profitable I’d see that as a well guarded niche.

AlbertCory4• 4 years ago

Content absolutely does scale with budget

Wrong, unless you measure "content" by "minutes of screen time."

If you measure it by box office, then we can easily prove you wrong. Many of the other commenters have already done that.

jmyeet3• 4 years ago

Here's a good example of the problem. Marvel vs DC.

Both of these companies have significant (ie decades) of original material to draw upon. For the last 20 years, superhero movies have absolutely dominated the theaters.

But no one would look at this situation and draw any conclusion other than Marvel has trounced DC. Is the Marvel source material just that much better? IMHO it isn't to a significant enough degree.

What is different is execution. Marvel IP has just been better managed and they've had and built a better organization around it. It's drawn on Disney's extensive pedigree in this business.

Producing original content is difficult. It requires a culture of putting up with the 10 flops for that 1 breakout hit. There is no formula for that 1 breakout hit. A million factors go into why that hit became a hit and it's not a formula that can be copied and reproduced as the VC funding model demands.

andsoitis• 4 years ago

Netflix arguably may have run itself into insolvency

Neither the balance sheet nor the income statement or cash flow statement supports your statement.

atwood222• 4 years ago

Last quarter they reported 1.6B net income. Not even close to insolvency.

rtpg2• 4 years ago

The story that I saw is that they have a lot of loans kicking in the next couple of years that will totally wipe out their profit margins.

Looking at [0] it looks like it's.... manageable but you still need the money. If you're making 1.5 billion in profit and the next year you have 2 billion in debt to payoff...

[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/21/netflixs-mountain-...

related reading from when things felt more rosey in 2019:

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/cf0f0bd6-4596-11e9-a965-23d669740...

TechBro8615• 4 years ago

VC firms, game studios, and movie studios all operate using the same “blockbuster business model,” meaning they expect the profits from one of every ten deals to pay for the losses of the other nine.

Maybe the lesson is that multiple blockbuster models interfere with each other when combined into one venture? It seems kind of like how you can’t make an infinite chain of hypervisors.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

With VC funding, though, once they find that one blockbuster business, they expect it to be able to grow exponentially because it has a defensible, unique "special sauce" that is scalable.

With games, though, one successful game or franchise rarely guarantees additional successful games or franchises. In some ways it's "catching lightning in a bottle", and very difficult to repeat, even if you have the same inputs (designers, programmers, funding).

BurningFrog• 4 years ago

I think it's that the "blocks" are much smaller for games/movies than for tech companies.

A great game or movie can make a ton of money. But a great tech company can make 2-3 orders of magnitude more.

KaoruAoiShiho• 4 years ago

HN is wild lol, if this is correct then Disney wouldn't exist.

jmyeet3• 4 years ago

Disney has organically grown over the better part of a century. VC funding is predicated on way higher growth rates.

Look at any movie studio, Disney, HBO, etc and you'll find this same story repeated time and time again. Every one of them grew at much slower growth rates. There was no 10x'ing of revenue in a few years (when in the billions).

Even outliers like Pixar existed for 20 years before becoming a significcant component of Disney.

Book publishing? Same deal.

No original content business has followed a VC growth trajectory like tech companies have. Not one. You might be tempted to argue Netflix has but Netflix has taken on a ton of debt and raised a ton of VC funding and used their profits to throw money at this problem with mixed results.

beambot• 4 years ago

A quick Google search indicates that $4B has been invested by VCs in video game companies since ~2010 [1]. The fact that these businesses are "hits based" actually aligns very closely with the power-law nature of VC returns. In fact, Electronic Arts was backed by Sequoia in the 1980s & does $7B in annual revenue today. Lots of other "successes" (defined by achieved liquidity for early VC investors) include Zynga, Tencent, Roblox, etc.

https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/video-games-companies-early-s...

pimlottc• 4 years ago

Remember Angry Birds? Rovio took VC funding. How did that work out?

They have branded toys and merch everywhere in the universe and even had a movie.

Whether they’re making money, I have no idea, but from a naive point of view they seem to have been pretty successful.

meheleventyone3• 4 years ago

Most content isn’t funded through a VC model though but a more traditional publishing one where you get advanced the money to make the content with a contract that lets the publisher recoup first and then take a percentage of revenue.

Netflix is a publisher in this context but only sells through its own channels so is more analogous to console manufacturers in games. Their problem is basically having a low barrier for competitors to enter and they all own more compelling first-party content.

Most VC funded companies are doing more than producing content or are opening markets. Which isn’t to say the games investment hype cycle hasn’t been very silly lately but it’s more often a bet on technology and/or a potentially emerging market.

p1necone• 4 years 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.

ocdtrekkie2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

spoils19• 4 years ago

Agreed, I actually have never heard of Pokémon Go until late last year, imagine my surprise when I learnt that it's not only hugely popular, but even those who don't usually play games it as well!

BarryMilo• 4 years ago

The only AR gaming experience that would immersive to me is... VR. Reality just ain't all that.

IshKebab• 4 years ago

I disagree. I think the hololens showed that AR can be equally as compelling as VR. Seeing stuff in the real world is really cool, and I imagine multiplayer stuff (like laser tag) could be cool.

The main issue with it was the hilariously small field of view. If they solve that I can imagine it being as popular as VR.

daveoc64• 4 years ago

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

jmcgough• 4 years ago

They were doing fine without it, but Pokemon Go completely changed their trajectory as a company - just a huge influx of cash.

RodgerTheGreat• 4 years ago

Definitely not a huge influx of original ideas, though.

pizzathyme• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

whywhywhywhy6• 4 years 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.

tootie• 4 years 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.

cykros14• 4 years ago

In fairness, when they started Ingress, Google Glass was in Beta testing. We all KNEW it was just around the corner. The videos of being able to SEE the portals in the real world had us drooling. And then...it never happened.

Microsoft used AR fantastically in Minecraft Earth, I might add. The thing that killed this attempt was the fact that the game didn't run well on any currently existing hardware (I had a Pixel 5 and could watch the battery drain in real time...nevermind feeling like I should be wearing gloves to combat the heat). When doing an adventure in ME, if skeletons were shooting at you, you dodged by ACTUALLY DODGING, which was definitely a novel experience (and made for looking like a total fool in the park...but hey, you're playing Minecraft in the park). It feels like at some point, this sort of thing is inevitable, but the hardware may be what is ultimately holding things back for now.

Niantic's attempts at visual AR haven't been nearly as interesting -- not sure if this is just knowing that the hardware wouldn't hold up, or not having the vision to implement it. They used to at least have the interest in immersive alternate reality gaming that tied in nicely, but that seems to be a long gone thing of the past.

feelandcoffee• 4 years 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• 4 years 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...

perardi5• 4 years 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…)

nijave• 4 years ago

It seems they ignore anything that isn't directly monetizable

cjensen• 4 years 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.

nkrisc2• 4 years 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.

perardi5• 4 years ago

I immediately turned off the “feed your Pokémon AR mode”.

While it is theoretically fun to plop your Piplup on a table and feed it a Pinap: it’s slower than a Slowking to do so, and got very old very fast.

darknavi• 4 years ago

We had some design challenges (and many other types of challenges...) but we really tried with Minecraft: Earth to go big with AR AND location-based gaming.

After we sunset it, it really struck me how scary GaaS can be. No one can play Minecraft in AR any more (at least currently) and I think that, even if it got old fast, it was a pretty magical experience. It made me really want to record a video playthrough for a few hours to try and capture the experience.

Cayde-62• 4 years ago

For anyone that played Ingress, Niantic's earlier game, then the poor handling of Pokemon Go development is exactly inline with expectations, though still disappointing.

RugnirViking2• 4 years ago

ingress is a weird one, despite being several years older it still has longevity. There is still a dedicated core of players for it that follow the complex story, and I know a bunch of the players in my (small-ish) city, and have on several occasions occasion come across them in person. The big issue to my eyes is that they have a winning formula with the area control game, but they don't do much to shake it up (they do occasionally and every time it's awesome, like targets that travel between portals that players have to fight to funnel towards certain areas for their team)

Tepix3• 4 years ago

Were you playing on iOS or Android?

praptak3• 4 years ago

It must be "in their DNA" or something. You could replace "Pokemon Go" with "Ingress", their earlier game, and get to almost exactly the same conclusions.

Also, with Ingress the most innovative area was also the one that players complained about the loudest - I am talking about actual player interactions. Going to someone else's portal and bombing it, creating blocker links, covering a strategic area with a huge field so as to win the cycle, etc. Unfortunately it got too competitive some players, so they started location spoofing, edit wars on portals and other behaviors that made the experience shitty for others.

Niantic's reaction was to gut that from their next games rather than try to improve. So I'm still waiting for a good location-based game where you can have some real location-based interactions with other players. Current offering is mostly "everybody going outside and playing a single-player game next to each other".

hnbad• 4 years ago

I think Introversion Software's "Subversion"[0] is an excellent case study for the kind of problem Niantic's games always had: all tech demo, no game.

Ingress was an incredibly exciting technical innovation at the time. The idea of playing an area control game using your real world GPS coordinates was novel and the game encouraged genuine discovery in its initial phase by allowing you to record local points of interest: even in your hometown the game might lead you to walk down a road you were unfamiliar with and discover an interesting monument, fountain or building.

But they never really considered where to take it from there. Once the novelty wore off, it was mostly grind. Advanced players quickly developed strategies to optimize their play and "casuals" quickly fell behind with no way to catch up. The game remained fun for a small core group but effectively lacked an on-ramp for new players. Pokemon Go repeated this problem. They had created new exciting systems but not figured out how to make the game sustainably "fun" for most players.

I can only recommend watching the entire Failure Masterclass series from Introversion Software but at least the final video addressing their most anticipated game that never was, Subversion (a spiritual successor to Uplink). Without spoiling too much, the game was becoming increasingly complex and interesting but ultimately failed because there was no "game" there that would survive contact with players.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1giu6sMnAxY&list=PLbv7YX5V1c...

sitkack• 4 years ago

"in their DNA", it is a Google spin out after all.

cykros14• 4 years ago

Spot on. Ingress was fun when there was engagement, and it largely came down to whether or not your local community was particularly lame. However, that it was even able to succeed as well as it did had largely to do with not being particularly popular, in particular among the minor population. They'd almost need a 21+ age verifier to avoid the disaster that'd come with a game of that nature that actually grew to large scale. I'd love to see Shadowrun as an AR GPS game, but it absolutely is in this boat.

shultays• 4 years ago

Pokemon Go is so much wasted potential. Could have been an amazing game with more content. Just look at existing pokemon go games and try to add such content (random NPCs around the world, random/semi random quests, more building/store types etc. Maybe even seasonal events like fighting gyms and collecting badges) and it would be an amazing game. Hire me niantic.

My guess is pokemon company intentionally butchers it and makes it distinct than (or lite version of) regular pokemon games.

lambic• 4 years ago

I played Pokemon Go daily throughout the pandemic as a way to get out of the house and get some exercise. I also quit a few months ago as the walking habit has stuck without the need for any other incentive.

eddyfromtheblok• 4 years ago

it's their player-created database of waypoints that is their most tangible asset, they have data on which spots are visited by the most people.

wly_cdgr• 4 years 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

tbrownaw2• 4 years ago

      --      ----    ----
      \/      |  |    |  |
      /       \  /    ----
     /         \/ 


                       |
     \        \        | /|
      | /|     ---     |/ |
      |/ |       |
          \

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

Ancalagon• 4 years ago

looks like...unknowns hieroglyphics?

RugnirViking2• 4 years 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.

aneeshnl2• 4 years ago

Resistance or Enlightenment ?

tbrownaw2• 4 years ago

;)

max-m• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

I don't know how much they can stretch the license

bombcar• 4 years ago

Didn't seem to be able to stretch to anything more of an actual ... game.

rexf3• 4 years 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/

These are ticketed (monetized), location specific events for players.

lostgame• 4 years 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

AlbertCory4• 4 years 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.

yomkippur• 4 years 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

AlbertCory4• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

EnKopVand• 4 years ago

I think the biggest issue for location based apps is that no one except niantic have access to Google’s map data.

If that data was easily available, I imagine you’d see a lot of great location apps. It’s not hard to imagine the normal Pokémon games in the location setting, where you actually move around instead of moving an avatar around and “fight” Pokémon in different areas to “win” them, or go to “gyms” and battle with friends and what not.

You’d probably need to design the stranger meeting stranger part around having that sort of thing only happen in secure locations like in the DND/Warhammer shop, and everything on non secure locations be based on friend systems, but still, it’s not hard to imagine a good location based Pokémon game. It’s just that niantic won’t make it.

Maybe open street map can supply the data, but you’re never going to have access to Google’s real world live monitoring of the movement of everyone with a smartphone.

Tepix3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

whywhywhywhy6• 4 years ago

That’s the thing. You can’t turn Pokémon Go into a franchise because you don’t own Pokémon.

Trying to build your startup on an IP you don’t own is a trap.

Animats• 4 years 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.

aneeshnl2• 4 years 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.

cykros14• 4 years 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.

alasdair_• 4 years 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.

cykros14• 4 years 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• 4 years ago

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

t_mann5• 4 years 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• 4 years 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_mann5• 4 years 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.

okwubodu• 4 years ago

It’s in a weird spot as one of the biggest successes in gaming history while also representing one of the biggest fumbles in gaming history.

Pokémon Go with a more aggressive turnaround time could have easily been Fortnite x10.

t_mann5• 4 years ago

Exactly. Yes, it's a successful game by traditional standards, but the initial hype was the biggest in gaming ever, by a wide margin. I'd argue that it would not have been that hard to convert a much higher percentage of those initial players with a few simple features like a decent battle and levelling system (simply use the template they used for every other Pokemon game) and optional PvP action (just challenge someone in your vicinity). I'm pretty sure people would have opened cafes just to facilitate Pokemon Go PvP battles.

pph• 4 years ago

I also felt that it was very boring and not living up to the hype at all, as the "gameplay" was basically to walk around and tap your screen sometimes to collect something or make a gesture on your screen to catch random useless Pokémon xyz by making a gesture instead. Besides the lackluster gameplay I also didn't see any meaningful progression system, so it lost my interest very quickly. The AR features were very gimmicky.

It could have been so much more. However I may not be in the target audience and some people did seem to enjoy the casual style - or play a lot despite that.

mrguyorama• 4 years ago

It was also obvious from the second you started playing that you were expected to shell out lots of money to get any semblance of the "designed experience".

Also for some reason there were no poke stops or anything of note within many miles of my home. I live in a city of 60k people. But niantic originally populated their map based on the important locations in ingress, so if that game wasn't popular where you lived you basically got locked out of gameplay.

cykros14• 4 years ago

Ingress was much better about giving you a real reason to pick out specific places. You didn't HAVE to do it, but building large fields to cover big territory was (and may well still be) a huge part of what made the game fun for a lot of people, as was building blocking links in order to stop others from doing the same thing. And all of that actually made use of the map effectively.

Pokemon Go, on the other hand...never really did. Sure, you've got the gyms, and biomes...the raids turned into this whole weird activity of piling into cars to drive from raid to raid...but generally, a raid in one place was as good as a raid in another. And dear god, while I thought Ingress had you staring at your phone a bit too much, at least if you were out doing those fielding trips, you had it in your pocket in between portals (which, depending on your area, could have been miles). Not generally so with Pokemon Go (though I'm sure rural players will disagree with me here).

Jcowell• 4 years ago

I don't get it why they ditched the signature Pokemon fighting system for something pretty arbitrary,

This is the biggest fumble and what cemented the death of the game to me. Here’s what I think should have happened:

* Used the regular fighting system (turn based fighting)

* Allow players to have 6 on-hand Pokémon with the ability to preset teams.

* Any Pokémon caught after all 6 slots are filled are stored in the PC.

* Utilize the nostalgia of the old Gameboy/DS System and allow players that are within a certain distance to start a battle.

* Allow the creation of local tournaments (no exp gained )

* Hold regional based Tournaments where the winner is named the champion of that region and is qualified to participate in a National tournament.

* Hold a Worldwide tournament crowning a Pokémon World Champion. Participants must be winners of their nation’s tournament. (World Cup but for Pokémon)

* After a quantifiable amount of World Champions are made have prestigious “Pokémon Master” Tournament where the winner is crowned a Pokémon Master. Participants must be winners and runner ups of the World championship. Pull out all the stops to make this a hyped event on the same standing as League of Legends/Valorant E-sports tournaments since your already suing an IP greater than it.

* Add Dual Battle’s with a friend

* Hold Safari Zones/Events that allow rare specific Pokémon to be captured with increase of shinies (should have made these rare)

* For non PVP-players add in a Pokémon Snap like competition where participants can submit Photos of their Pokémon or wild Pokémon.

So much potential squandered.

m3kw9• 4 years 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.

cykros14• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

mavhc5• 4 years 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

rexf3• 4 years ago

Niantic has received a lot of (warranted IMO) criticism. That said, they did make some positive improvements during the Covid era:

They increased the interaction radius for Pokestops & Gyms. They actually reverted it (at the "end" of covid), faced a giant backlash, and un-reverted it (back to the increased radius). This is a rare occurrence of Niantic actually listening to the community.

They introduced remote raid passes. Remote raids are great in a pandemic since you can raid with friends from anywhere. I assume these generate a lot of income for Niantic since it's sold for 250 coins (now 300 coins) for 3 passes. What's baffling to me is how they are constantly discouraging users from doing remote raids.

tinco2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

differentView• 4 years ago

They didn't shut down Ingress.

tinco2• 4 years ago

Hm maybe I misremembered

alacrau• 4 years 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.

theptip2• 4 years ago

It’s a shame; I think their Lightship platform sounds pretty interesting, if it can accelerate AR game implementation.

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.

meheleventyone3• 4 years 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.

theptip2• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

Tepix3• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

whywhywhywhy6• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

whywhywhywhy6• 4 years ago

Pokémon is a weird one because you’re a game company licensing a game IP from one of the biggest and oldest game empires. Like really how hard would it be for Pokémon Company/Nintendo to replicate Pokemon Go on their own terms.

Then there’s the other big hitters like you’d be shocked how much of your revenue of a Star Wars themed product evaporates on dumb things like you included the Star Wars music so have to pay the composer X per sale.

philistine• 4 years ago

Your insights are very good. A small data point I’ll add: Pokémon is the most profitable franchise ever. Nothing has made more money. Pokémon is a global phenomenon unrivalled in its ability to make money around the globe.

So there was nowhere to go but down from Niantic. Harry Potter is not as strong in Asia.

xiaolingxiao• 4 years ago

Sharp take. Dapper labs is having he same issue with nba, their license ended and now they’re scrambling to find the next nft thing. Could you speak about angry birds tho, they own their IP but havnt really had success after the mobile craze wore off. Is it even possible to have a prolonged media franchise, regardless of who owns it?

whywhywhywhy6• 4 years ago

I mean they still own it right? There was a time you could buy any piece of tat in the world with that red birds face on it so because they own it the potential is always there to reboot it somehow.

Think the only real misstep is they didn't worldbuild good enough, they're birds and they're angry, the pigs steal their eggs and thats kinda where it ends, good comparison might be Minions I mean the base minion characters are as shallow as Angry Birds but there is more elements/characters/stories of their world around that there will still be movies set in the minions world in 10 years from now.

Although Angry Birds the glorified flash game made a lot of money, there just wasn't enough story and worldbuilding there to sustain a movie and a themepark. Think they should have been more ambitious with that side or even built out the rest of the world where Angry Birds is just one small part of it, like how Donkey Kong has his own games but he is also a subset of the Mario universe.

Where Rovio is they could always do another reboot of the games or a live action edgy Angry Birds movie but Niantic is stuck, Pokemon Company holds all the cards and without Niantic Pokemon is still huge but without Pokemon Niantic is nothing.

grumple• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

cykros14• 4 years 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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

cykros14• 4 years 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.

Niantic undergoes layoffs, cancels four games

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