Niantic Labs splitting from Google | Hacker News Reader

Niantic Labs splitting from Google

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123 pointsmartindale63 comments

Given that they didn't mention Alphabet, it seems safe to assume they mean really independent, not Alphabet-independent. I wonder if this was Niantic's or Google's decision.

EDIT: I assume Google still has equity, hence why they were mentioned. You can't spin out without the parent company getting something.

But they also say: "... with some amazing new partners joining Google as collaborators and backers."

The timing would also suggest that it could be part of Alphabet.

On the other hand, why wouldn't they even mention Alphabet if they were becoming a subsidiary?

I'm confused. At a minimum, it sounds like Google is somehow still involved.

Magic Leap?

It could also be referring to more of the partnerships they've had in the past, such as the company branded game items (AXA, MUFG, Softbank).

This is very interesting to me. I guess this means Alphabet has enough confidence in Niantic to essentially spin them off. They wouldn't do this if they had negative future prospects right? I honestly had no idea Niantic was this big to warrant spinning them off from Alphabet.

Or, more likely, Niantic was doing badly (financially) and they wanted them gone. If they were doing well, why would they let them go?

A number of reasons but usually focus. It's amazing how distracting even moneymakers that aren't core to the business are to big businesses.

Doing well or badly financially is usually reflected in the price you are getting for the spin-off. At the right price, even spinning off very profitable parts of your business can be good.

The argument about distraction still holds.

I've always thought Niantic / Ingress was never intended to make a profit, but instead gamify exploration and map routes and whatnot where Google's street maps cars couldn't reach.

Google has a lot of services and products that don't earn them money directly (Chrome is probably the biggest one, Android another), but which do provide Google indirectly - Chrome's initial focus on speed meant lots more page views which caused lots more ad impressions which caused more income. In theory.

Companies usually spin things off when they're becoming a distraction for upper management. That doesn't necessarily mean they're big or that management has confidence in them, eg. hello.com is another Google spin-off that hasn't even launched yet.

Or possibly they're receiving some funding that stipulates not being Google-owned, and everyone just agreed that's the best way forward.

Niantic has been notoriously slow at infrastructure upgrades, shutting down huge parts of the game (like the Intel Map[0] practically required for large-scale operations) during peak hours, which are always of course during events. Could it be that they needed to spin off from Google in order to get access to AWS, among other things?

[0] https://www.ingress.com/intel

I don't see a reason why they wouldn't be able to scale on Google's could. So I don't think that has anything to do with the spinoff.

Interesting hearsay on Reddit (via Twitter) https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/631630506300448769, claiming it was spun off because it wasn't considered valuable.

The Resistance (including me) and Enlightened in my area have really scaled back lately; even Hangouts/Slack chat is getting quiet. I don't know if that's a sign of things worldwide (it seems Japan is hot and heavy in the game right now according to one of our agents who just got back from there) but it appears a lot of the long-time players are stepping out of the game. We also see a ton of newbies come and quickly go, often never reaching past level 3 or so. I think that is partly due to the group mods no longer actively recruiting them into the group and helping with training.

I realize churn is a common occurrence with any MMO, but Ingress always seemed like more than a game; our group socializes outside of the game and I wouldn't be surprised if we all remained in contact long after Niantic shuts it down.

Still very active everywhere I've played.

I am playing in Europe for about 12 months, and while the game is still going on, the number of players doesn't increase...some are joining, and about the equal amount leaves. So I wonder if the game had its peak already. After a few months it becomes kind of repetitive... but anyway, it's a good game, I enjoy playing it, especially if I come to some new city.

The Ingress game was a thinly-veiled way to fill in location data where Google didn't have coverage in it's own database, right? Why would they let this strategic asset go? I bet Mozilla MLS would love to have this kind of popular data source.

It's like how DNS queries to 8.8.8.8 can allow Google to find more of the web to spider.

I suspect Niamtic have found all the low hanging fruit, thus no more Seer badges.

It is also possible that Google has refined a "find local points of interest" algorithm which is based on where people stop for longer than might be indicated by traffic lights, pedestrian crossings or other signifiers. Then there is metadata from images (crawl places like Flickr and SmugMug for example).

Add to that the cost of having people review portal submissions and you can invent reasons why Google would want to let Niantic go.

> It's like how DNS queries to 8.8.8.8 can allow Google to find more of the web to spider.

Any links discussing that?

Nothing clear-cut, sorry. Although their policy does say they permanently log all requested domains.

Anecdotally, i run a private community site on "foo".dyndns.org with no inbound links anywhere, never submitted to google webmaster tools, but it shows up in a google search for "foo". Google public DNS is widely used amongst community members.

I haven't seen any links but I wouldn't be surprised. It was a theme (meme?) at Google to create a free service to generate data for other stuff. They create their 411 service to collect voice recognition information (for example). And I do believe Ingress (game) was originally a way to augment their maps data.

Maybe your conspiracy theories were wrong.

Google will still remain as a "partner," whatever that means. But with this move they could try selling their location data to other players - Microsoft, Nokia, etc.

Hmmm.... does this mean totally independent or part of Alphabet?

Ingress is a great idea - but poorly implemented. I have cheated (not with malicious intent - I just wanted to prove that it could be done), and heard of other potential cheating cases as well.

I definitely wouldn't use GPS as a sole indicator of someone's position for a game.

Do you think that's a solvable problem? I would imagine it isn't, outside of using statistical analysis to spot obvious widespread cheating.

Gamers develop sophisticated cheats, and, yes, multi-player game companies do look for outliers. It's not a solvable problem but it is an advanced arms race.

The solution is to use other sources of location information in addition to GPS.

Unless that source of information is not on the phone, it will have the same problem. And I'm not sure I want cell phone companies reporting in to external parties where my phone is.

Can't those other sources also be spoofed?

> Can't those other sources also be spoofed?

It's a lot harder to spoof say for example APs near you, signal strength to a cell tower, and/or IP geolocation - than a GPS signal.

If you can spoof all of that - you probably aren't interested in playing a game like ingress. You have your own more interesting game you play...

Ah yep makes sense!

Spoofing was an issue for cheating but so was GPS data quality: spend enough time in a metro area and you're ready to tear your hair out because of constant drift.

Combine that with Niantic's shift from freely giving equipment away to forcing players to "glyph hack" (repeat back a series of proprietary symbols) and casual players dropped out of the game.

I can imagine there'd be a number of mitigations you could do, like detecting impossibly fast travel times between locations. Although cheating then would be a matter of taking it slowly.

The trailers were rather cool, but the game came down to running around and mashing buttons in a rather ugly interface on your phone.

The community and the meta-game quickly became the engrossing part of the game. If you like coordinating with other players and getting together to wander around and mash buttons on your phone, then it's great. You can still play by taking walks by yourself, but that's not as much fun.

I think this is pretty common evolution for games. Games from bridge to Magic:The Gathering to softball are as much about the social elements as they are about the actual gameplay.

It was like WoW or Eve, but in the real world.

Which is probably why I quit; I much preferred walking around on my own, rather than trying to coordinate with people.

Oh well. It wasn't for me, and in the month or two that I played it, I did see some pretty neat stuff around the city that I hadn't before.

The crypto challenges are fun as well.

agreed. that was the worst case of vapor ware... well not because they delivered... old hackers would call it "spiffy"... but i think the better term now is it was the worst case of Hollywood OS ever.

I played with Ingress for a couple of days, using GPS spoofing - but they quickly somehow found a way to catch people doing that (multiple location sources, I'm guessing).

One of the methods of detection is to upload the SSID of WIFI access points around you, including signal strengths. It's pretty easy to spot someone who knows/has pulled apart the client as they usually (accidentally) refer to actions by the internal API method names instead of the UI names. :-)

I played it up to level 8 a couple of years ago, and gave up once I hit 8.

My problem was that I thought the core gameplay was really flawed: there was (there may be now, I haven't played for a while) no benefit to holding territory, only taking territory... which means you have a vested interest in letting the other team capture your portals so you can take them back. So after a while each team takes turns capturing the portal and sticking cheap and crappy level 1 resonators on it. You don't want to make the portal hard to recapture. That's not fun.

Wandering around cities looking for portals was fun, and got me to find several places in the city where I was living which I wouldn't have found otherwise. (I have since moved city. Maybe I should try it again...)

There still isn't - besides of course the claim that you own that area with your name on it.

Oh and the game is divided up into seasons, you can see in the Intel screen a history of how much area your 'side' holds and has held historically in the current period.

Gameplay is still really reliant on the "meta" game (local rivalries, meeting up with teammates, etc) for long term entertainment but as far as in-game mechanics, after a certain point, you need to earn badges for different things like holding areas or creating fields over densely populated areas in order to level up. Between that and missions (stuff like "hack these 20 portals in this one historic district") there's still a bit to accomplish.

That said, it can still get old fast. King-of-the-hill + geocaching essentially. Claim areas, lose areas, nothing lasts for long, etc. Still, it can be fun to see the opposing faction trying to make a big field to gain points before the end of a cycle and coordinating with other people in your town to knock it down before they score those points. Same goes for the opposite way.

I met a fellow Ingress player once (in, luckily, a public place for a brief period of time). Weirdly, obsessively creepy, the kind of person who stares fixedly at your left ear while talking. I'm sure he wasn't representative, but...

Besides, if I wanted to talk to other humans, I wouldn't be playing a computer game! I gave up on Eve for the same reason, once I ran out of early game content and realised I'd have to join a corp to progress.

I haven't seen Ingress get to the front page since I joined, so I needto take this opportunity to shout out to my fellow resistance crew!

How do you feel about Justinian's actions in response to the riots?

background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots ...from AD 532.

Thanks, I had no idea about the reference!

I've been trying to turn the blue/green parallel into a solid history joke for about a year, but I think I still missed the mark.

Hello there! :D

Cheers! Keep given em hell!

A source inside Niantic hinted something to do with 3D, not sure if it's related to Project Tango. Target release is the same time on the next event series (Oct-ish 2015). Some employees that I know were originally Googlers chose to stay with Google.

I do hope Niantic Labs finds more success in this move.

If NIA isn't becoming a part of Alphabet, I'm quite sure soon I'll have more free time to pursue other hobbies. My reaction is quite ambivalent...

I feel like this has to mean becoming a subsidiary of Alphabet (and is probably the first of many Google divisions to become an Alphabet subsidiary).

Nope. Not part of Alphabet. Definitely on its own, but still partly owned by Google. (I'm a Googler who works with somebody who just transferred out of Niantic.)

How do these splits work? Is Google still a shareholder or something? If not, why would they just give up on this for free?

I wonder if that convention they were planning to hold is still going to happen.

Probably. They're saying additional backers, and google's staying on, which strongly suggests that they're in it for the long haul.

Good news for them, I guess. This way they can write iOS, Windows Phone, etc. clients to go with their Android one. Also ditch the unsupportive parent company (more wood behind fewer arrows and all that) known for killing projects.

An official iOS app already exists.

Apparently the N namespace was already reserved on the alphabet.

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