Niantic undergoes layoffs, cancels four games
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(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…)
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".
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...
So are all the optimizations, really. There's enough surface area in the game they do provide some depth and give new people incentive to network with the pros. Whenever Niantic introduces a new Pokemon, mechanic or bonus there's something new to learn in terms of the meta-game.
I started playing in 2016 before the official release, but hasn't done so since some time in the pandemic - remote raids took out the fun out of it for me.
The game is you go outside and discover interesting places, then if you want, make friends with other players and organise stuff together
A group of determined players can keep a town permanently covered by a field, preventing everybody else from playing, especially if the anchor portals are in military bases or gated communities.
But that forum is a cesspool, both users and moderators are such assholes.
Maybe you need to play the game of being friendly with the people who permafield you and convincing them not to. Or being friendly with people who can stop them
Not really high level play, just high don't-care-about-anyone-else play
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.
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.
Some of the big flying Pokémon were also terrible to interact with. Nearly off-screen if they moved.
I used to walk my local park daily for years, only ever saw a few people. Seemingly out of nowhere, the park seemed always packed...kids, adults, you name it. It was kind of jarring to me, to be honest.
I mentioned it in passing to my brother, kinda complaining about the sudden crowds but later describing it down to details...how people seemed to be taking pics of the ground for no reason...he said "they're playing pokemon go, dummy." I had no idea such a thing existed and thought I was going nuts.
But ultimately what I saw was a lot of people venturing out and about, enjoying the day, having fun solo or in groups... and thought it was a net positive to society, for once, unlike most modern apps and games.
Or…that’s how it used to be.
COVID neutered quite a lot of that. Though in retrospect it was a bit silly to be that scared of being outside…let’s not go there…
But more so, Niantic’s responses really killed in-person gameplay. You had Remote Raids, where you could be invited to join a raid at a gym from a friend. A good idea, but one they never really weaned the player base off of, because it was way easier for players to stay on the couch. (Well, and Niantic made fat bundles of cash off the Remote Raid Passes IAP.)
They also made totally sensible changes to interaction distances—which is to say, they doubled (was it doubled…whatever, a non-trivial increase) the distance you could be away from a Pokéstop or a Gym to interact with it. A really nice change, and one that I think made the game better even outside the pandemic. And they rolled it back, right when Omicron took hold. And they barely spoke a word about any of the changes. It felt fickle. Arbitrary.
I'm not familiar enough to say what they should have done, but whatever they were doing early on was clearly working better.
My guess is pokemon company intentionally butchers it and makes it distinct than (or lite version of) regular pokemon games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They also made the larger events (anomalies) paid entry, it was free before.
It was definitely an interesting way to put you on an IRL collision course with other people of similar tech interests.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trying to build your startup on an IP you don’t own is a trap.
And then send you a big bill.
Pokémon Go with a more aggressive turnaround time could have easily been Fortnite x10.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neither the balance sheet nor the income statement or cash flow statement supports your statement.
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...
You refinance...of course. Debt is always cycled like this. Yes, interest rates are higher than before but they are still incredibly low.
I understand that cash flow issues can be resolved with corporate debt, but it requires convinced counter parties and, honestly, future revenue to bargain with. “Our subscriber count isn’t really going up and we need to borrow more money consistently every year” is not the same as “we are immensely profitable” (though I don’t think it’s a doomsday scenario in itself)
How different is Netflix from paramount plus?
As OP said: the content business is not normal. You can't assume that big budgets == big success.
Make 29 original shows, feel great if one becomes mainstream popular.
This isn't insurmountable, and Netflix has shown itself to be full of innovative means of handling this reality. But while the bulk of the last 10 years was just gathering subscribers to pay for other peoples' content (remember, until recently, The Office, Friends, Star Trek, and Disney movies were ALL on Netflix), the next 10 will require them to do more in the way of finding original content that works, and acquiring things from smaller/foreign studios (a la Squid Game). They've got practice, but they've lost their money printer.
The problem is rarely does a show last more than a few seasons and that is mostly because of how contracts are written where you pay low for an unknown actors for 2/3 seasons and when those contracts are up for renewal you move on.
On network tv after 4 seasons it can be sold for syndication so many shows get cancelled. For netflix the money spent on new seasons keeps existing customers but does nothing to attract new ones. This forces netflix to create new shows that hopefully attract new subs.
It’s not as simple as throwing poop at the wall and hoping a bit of it sticks.
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.
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).
From what I've heard, the game industry is notorious for laying a lot of the staff off after a game project before they even know if the game is successful or not. Then they might bring those people back for a sequel if they are still available when they start making it.
So on top of all the known issues, one can be let go at any time.
I think in our oncoming age of batteries that this expression could have new meaning.
A great game or movie can make a ton of money. But a great tech company can make 2-3 orders of magnitude more.
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.
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.
https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/video-games-companies-early-s...
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.
"Turn this handful of people into the next Niantic" is a far better bet, but it's not relevant since Niantic was already there! That's the similarity to Hollywood - "let's make a bunch of movies or a bunch of pilots and see which one is the moneymaker." But not many of the production companies behind those shows or movies have gotten 10x more profitable in the future by scaling horizontally.
I'm not sure if it's an overly cautious legal team they're dealing with or what, but someone should remind John Hanke that start ups don't break through by playing it safe. And to boot, casual players aren't the ones that dump money into games. Maybe they need to add age verification in to satisfy the lawyers before making a game that's actually fun to play, but this backing away from doing what they're in the business of doing is sad to watch and frankly pretty pathetic.
That seems obviously not right? If anything, the model in 'content' predates the technology VC business.
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.
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.
We actually don’t know. They veil the real numbers for each movie in complicated shell and subsidiary corporations and private arrangements that can’t be audited by the public.
If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio because of that, good luck to you, but... doesn't seem like you'll get a lot of bites.
Where did I make a claim about the top line numbers?
> If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio
Wut? At this point I’m not sure you’re actually responding to my comment but cheers
The claim I made was about "their revenue" - that's the top-line number. You disputed that by saying we don't know.
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.
I kinda love the “it’s definitely wrong or taken out of context, but once I’ll have finished telling the story we’ll have forgotten about that caveat” vibe that comes with this disclaimer.
Sony is no stranger to throwing spaghetti at the whole to see which stick, I mean they have are a movie studio in Japan too, and no they’re not throwing homeruns after homeruns all year long.
Also that’s a pretty good joke reply I think.
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.
It spent $4 billion on the company in 2009. They’ve easily made $100b off of the films, TV shows, comics, merchandise, theme park rides, etc.
I wholly agree with your point re: content that it has the culture of 10 flops for every hit. But that studio model, which has always existed in Hollywood, is the same model and a VC fund. Instead of going public, you get sequels or branch into other IP.
Are the returns the same? Generally no. But a good acquisition, like Marvel and Star Wars for Disney and Harry Potter (and to a lesser but historically significant degree, DC Comics) for Warner Bros, can pay dividends the exact same way as investing in a future tech titan.
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.
- it could still take any best seller book from the past 5 centuries and make it a script
- it could take any ancient story / non controversial religion gods / legend and turn into a script
- it could autogenerate stories from an AI until something that makes sense comes out and adapt that into a movie
I really think the input part is a solved problem, as long as there is enough talent to make it into a decent movie, and this part is move forgiving of "deja vu" and repeating the same techniques (nobody's gonna throw a fit because the director reused a shooting angle from a previous movie, at most it will be a meh moment)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Niantic would do well to remember its roots.
These are ticketed (monetized), location specific events for players.
It’s not a games studio, not really.
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/
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...
I'm pretty impressed.
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.
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"
So there was nowhere to go but down from Niantic. Harry Potter is not as strong in Asia.
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.
But then both those IPs are probably crazy cheap to develop for in comparison to Pokémon.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Fun in this space is hard. Go log into one of the crypto metaverses.
Pokemon GO was pretty unique to the masses, anything similar afterwards is common place.
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.
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Together Human Strong Separate Weak Failure