We just don't all agree with your rejection of the basic gameplay of the game.
Regarding the play store, the primary issue is people 1*ing a game that is at worst, 3* now. Prime is completely usable for normal play, but people who think they own the game don't like it so they're implementing mutual assured destruction.
@Perringaiden I guess the numbers may have dropped but the players who stick with it may invest more into store items. Don’t know details on PoGo. Never played it. Glad to see that nia is making some money out of it. Every company needs a cash cow. I just don’t hope that ingress will go down the Pogo or HPWU route with special events every two weeks. Nothing special if the special happens at 50% of the time like in HPWU at the moment.
Ingress needs to pay it's way. That's a stated requirement.
Right now, the Ingress team is working hard to reduce the cost of Ingress to a point where the playerbase can support it. That's largely why they've chosen not to move to RWP servers and rather slim down and improve the costs of the Intel map and the game servers. That's the work they're doing during the pandemic, mucking with performance and capability, at a time when the servers aren't being stressed.
PoGo has supported Ingress for five years, but there comes a point where all the benefits from the portal network submissions stop justifying paying for Ingress forever.
Every once in a while, a statement about PoGo's supposedly dwindling playerbase and loss of interest pops up, but it's completely unfounded. Take a look at https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/ and see that Pokemon Go has steadily grown in number of downloads and revenue (save for a dip in 2017). Today it's more popular and profitable than it has ever been! And I think I know why: that app is constantly evolving, there have been numerous new features added, and they keep the gameworld interesting by having lots of events.
I suspect why Ingress hasn't gotten the same amount of attention as Pogo (or HPWU for that matter): Ingress' purpose is to have players build a platform for all Niantic games (including Ingress itself). Our data is collected and sold. All OPR agents before my time have created a huge portion of their real-world platform. Our portal scanning efforts will.... well, imagine what they can do with that data. So, there's no need to give it that much attention, as the business model is working as intended already.
...Which I think is fine really, because we got something back. It's just that now we want a little bit more :) In the form of variation.
The primary reason Ingress hasn't gotten the same level of development since 2015 is purely because the revenue directly from Ingress is minimal.
We languished for 3 years with nothing but artwork development, then got a rushed PoGo based client, and then they stripped the Dev's back to what the money could afford. The lack of a 4+ rating in the Play Store/AppStore means that Ingress doesn't get suggested to new people, meaning that unless the player base brings in new people (which it has really never done in strength), the playerbase keeps dwindling removing any chance of recovering costs via sales.
We are definitely on a ****. Whether Niantic can pull us out of it, depends on their willingness to fund it.
@Jeroenix you do not want variation. You want a different game. In Pogo you throw a ball at some critters to catch them. At ingress you make triangles. Already plenty of variation in ingress available without the immediate need for more.
I think calling Ingress free should be stated with really big air quotes. Up till last year, I believe, most anamolies were coordinated by the players. Niantic provided dates, swag, and game play. Players got the hotels together, planned after parties, helped draw the playbox, did recruiting, and provided half-decent swag options, even in the tiny satellite sites. *Edit* I forgot to give Niantic credit for doing parties too. They really did some cool stuff the first couple of years at the primary sites. *Edit*
Aside from the initial seeding from the national historical landmark database, and some sponsor stores like Circle K, the players have contributed nearly the entire POI network. The players process change requests for existing portals. The players do most of the recruiting. The players contributed most of the missions (even mission day missions).
The players have provided Niantic with this massive infrastructure to spin off onto PoGo and HP, and we can't even get the ability to sort our badges.
I'm not at all advocating for the kind development they have for PoGo (I actually got burned out on trying to keep up with all the stuff they just kept introducing). I would really just like to see something that says "we still want you guys here" not just "here's a new drone, [silence]". Even something like a quarterly or periodic experimental update to get feedback on potential new features.
Okay, now that I got that off my chest, back to recharging.
I just had a think. Micro flash shards. You put a timer on a portal like a pogo raid and when the timer expires, 5 shards appear and 2 portals turn into scoring goals. Every 2 minutes the shards jump, every 4 minutes the portals jump. Keeps people from crowding target portals and encourages spreading out. And you can even monetize it with some kind of purchased shard item. Once the free micro-shard event is over, you can insert a purchased event shard (1 blue, 1 green) to reset the event.
I'm not sure what the incentive would be for wining such an event, but it sounds fun. From what I remember, the main point of moving Ingress to Prime was so that all the Niantic games would be under the same development environment/engine. The mechanics would already be there. Timer and buy in from pogo. Flash shard generation and portal jumping from Ingress.
You may have a point here. But I can't help thinking that "around" the catching game, they managed to keep PoGo interesting enough to bind players to them by adding features, holding events. I don't see that happening in Ingress at all, and I fear the only way is down for the numbers of players.
About sales, local selling laws apply. Also, this has been discussed in the past: anomalies rely on voluntary work, so making money from it sounds just wrong! Remote selling has also been tried but again local laws apply and this caused trouble in Europe at least.
We can have a discussion about additional events that nia can do to get some income. Or selling swag, items or more in game purchases via the store. But none of these should change the basic nature of the game which was the original proposal of this post by moving away from ‘just making triangles’. Ingress already has moved beyond just triangles with plenty other possibilities. And so far I have not seen two statistics which would validate this move.
a) how many old, seasoned and dedicated players would ingress loose by moving away from its core game mechanic? In comparison to how many it would gain/keep?
b) how long would these new players who suddenly like ingress because it turned into (for example candy crush) actually stick with the game?
Because what would the longterm gain be if you actually loose a good chunk of dedicated players whilst the new wave of players will only stick with it for a few weeks or months?
I have played for 6 years. And seen hundreds of players come and go. And a lot of them said ‘brilliant game’, ‘best game ever’ etc. And then played a few weeks or months and then stopped. Whereas the long lasting dedicated players and lovers of ingress for what it is in my experience are the ones willing to invest into swag, buying CMU, paying for visiting a NL van or anomalies etc.
In case there are any market surveys out there to say this proposed move will actually yield some long lasting benefit - then I am happy to support it. But so far not seen any of it.
nia recently done a survey on how much players would be willing to pay for a monthly subscription type of deal. Did they publish any data or outcome? Considering that I play every day I would be happy to pay £30 per month for the game. £1 or 1USD or 1 other local currency per day does sound perfectly fine to me. You pay more for a cinema visit, a pint or a sandwich. But unless nia is publishing some data on how big the actual player base is that for example spends 10h per week or more playing and hence how much money is required to cover dev costs etc - nobody knows how small or big the problem is.
In my opinion, they don't have a proper shop besides frackers, apex and keylockers. Weapons and resonators are obteinable just by farming, you can't sell something that you can have in the game already. On top of that, the items are really expensive, but the offer they have just make the 8th of August was quite good.
I like to see they are learning to make suitable offers to the agents.
Why can I buy the official Simpsons or Spongebob iPhone cases but can't purchase any of the official game branded cases? What prevents to sell the attributes of the game on ibey or amazon ???
Niantic gets paid when you pay for a flight across country?
Niantic gets paid when your faction makes it's own swag?
Niantic gets paid when your faction has their own after party?
Niantic gets paid when you buy a booster?
No. Niantic doesn't get anything from the vast majority of the money we spend, and the time we invest in the game. Anomalies have always either run at a loss, or barely broken even, with all the volunteer support. Without it, we wouldn't have anomalies. I've been a part of enough of them to know that for certain.
Ingress is the most expensive free game you'll ever find, but it was never designed to make Niantic money directly.
yea thats why we were supposed to only have 1 anomaly location this year due to all costs and nightmares to setup all permits for hosting anomalies etc.... they werent happy with last years umbra anomaly how it turend out if iremember right but then covid happend so all physical events are not possible for a long time now.... even next year still very uncertain.....
maybe soon this battle beacons will be released we will see how that turns out mini battles at smaller scale..
First, learn how the economy works. Nobody will organize a holiday for you, print gift items if it does not bring income. Attributes can also be produced through third-party suppliers, but with a surcharge from the selling company.
I am pretty sure that @Perringaiden has got a very solid understanding on economics.
Or maybe there is a language barrier with irony and sarcasm.
I believe it was yourself who claimed that niantic gets a license fee for evert sale. And that is likely true. But only for items sold by nia or for nia by any official nia swag trader.
Niantic is not getting a penny for 99% of expense that most players encounter playing this game. Petrol, travel, hotels, beer, cake, community organised events, venues or swag. All these are earning niantic ZERO. The best nia can hope for is for players to meet up in numbers and buy some frackers from the store. Or maybe tickets for the official afterparty.
But these expenses are the smallest percentage of money spend on playing the game. That is why ingress is a free game. Surely not that difficult to understand.
Niantic spent years paying for Ingress events out of the goodness of its heart and a desire for the game to prosper, because John Hanke has a soft spot for us.
Ingress was never designed to make a huge profit for Ingress. If you want an economic term look up "Loss Leader". It succeeded in its goals and we got PoGo.
If you look up the fate of Loss Leaders however, companies tend to end the projects after their purpose is served.
The biggest problem Ingress has is there's no revenue to get. The player base is shrinking. Very few dollars to get anymore. And why would a third party company invest to market with the Ingress game with very few hits? I'm shocked they are still running the game anymore. It can't be profitable to them. Pogo is their cash cow and that's where their attention is. And rightly so
media capsules has been requested i dont know how many years.... shop has very little interesting to offer today. frackers are too expensive and not worth it long ago. stuff like character badges could be in the shop and rotated every month or so. other cosmetic stuff that doesnt give gameplay advantages could be sold etc.....
im curious how much this battle beacons will cost once its released...
Comments
We'd all like to discuss it.
We just don't all agree with your rejection of the basic gameplay of the game.
Regarding the play store, the primary issue is people 1*ing a game that is at worst, 3* now. Prime is completely usable for normal play, but people who think they own the game don't like it so they're implementing mutual assured destruction.
PoGo had its highest revenue year in 2019. With very little changes in gameplay to that point.
You can only do so much work when the number of developers are limited. We aren't PoGo, so we don't warrant a 200 developer team.
However, all those announcements about instability during a period of time... that's them doing exactly that development and testing.
@Perringaiden I guess the numbers may have dropped but the players who stick with it may invest more into store items. Don’t know details on PoGo. Never played it. Glad to see that nia is making some money out of it. Every company needs a cash cow. I just don’t hope that ingress will go down the Pogo or HPWU route with special events every two weeks. Nothing special if the special happens at 50% of the time like in HPWU at the moment.
Ingress needs to pay it's way. That's a stated requirement.
Right now, the Ingress team is working hard to reduce the cost of Ingress to a point where the playerbase can support it. That's largely why they've chosen not to move to RWP servers and rather slim down and improve the costs of the Intel map and the game servers. That's the work they're doing during the pandemic, mucking with performance and capability, at a time when the servers aren't being stressed.
PoGo has supported Ingress for five years, but there comes a point where all the benefits from the portal network submissions stop justifying paying for Ingress forever.
Every once in a while, a statement about PoGo's supposedly dwindling playerbase and loss of interest pops up, but it's completely unfounded. Take a look at https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/ and see that Pokemon Go has steadily grown in number of downloads and revenue (save for a dip in 2017). Today it's more popular and profitable than it has ever been! And I think I know why: that app is constantly evolving, there have been numerous new features added, and they keep the gameworld interesting by having lots of events.
I suspect why Ingress hasn't gotten the same amount of attention as Pogo (or HPWU for that matter): Ingress' purpose is to have players build a platform for all Niantic games (including Ingress itself). Our data is collected and sold. All OPR agents before my time have created a huge portion of their real-world platform. Our portal scanning efforts will.... well, imagine what they can do with that data. So, there's no need to give it that much attention, as the business model is working as intended already.
...Which I think is fine really, because we got something back. It's just that now we want a little bit more :) In the form of variation.
The primary reason Ingress hasn't gotten the same level of development since 2015 is purely because the revenue directly from Ingress is minimal.
We languished for 3 years with nothing but artwork development, then got a rushed PoGo based client, and then they stripped the Dev's back to what the money could afford. The lack of a 4+ rating in the Play Store/AppStore means that Ingress doesn't get suggested to new people, meaning that unless the player base brings in new people (which it has really never done in strength), the playerbase keeps dwindling removing any chance of recovering costs via sales.
We are definitely on a ****. Whether Niantic can pull us out of it, depends on their willingness to fund it.
Seriously how is "s l o p e" a restricted word, @NianticCasey ...
@Jeroenix you do not want variation. You want a different game. In Pogo you throw a ball at some critters to catch them. At ingress you make triangles. Already plenty of variation in ingress available without the immediate need for more.
I think calling Ingress free should be stated with really big air quotes. Up till last year, I believe, most anamolies were coordinated by the players. Niantic provided dates, swag, and game play. Players got the hotels together, planned after parties, helped draw the playbox, did recruiting, and provided half-decent swag options, even in the tiny satellite sites. *Edit* I forgot to give Niantic credit for doing parties too. They really did some cool stuff the first couple of years at the primary sites. *Edit*
Aside from the initial seeding from the national historical landmark database, and some sponsor stores like Circle K, the players have contributed nearly the entire POI network. The players process change requests for existing portals. The players do most of the recruiting. The players contributed most of the missions (even mission day missions).
The players have provided Niantic with this massive infrastructure to spin off onto PoGo and HP, and we can't even get the ability to sort our badges.
I'm not at all advocating for the kind development they have for PoGo (I actually got burned out on trying to keep up with all the stuff they just kept introducing). I would really just like to see something that says "we still want you guys here" not just "here's a new drone, [silence]". Even something like a quarterly or periodic experimental update to get feedback on potential new features.
Okay, now that I got that off my chest, back to recharging.
I just had a think. Micro flash shards. You put a timer on a portal like a pogo raid and when the timer expires, 5 shards appear and 2 portals turn into scoring goals. Every 2 minutes the shards jump, every 4 minutes the portals jump. Keeps people from crowding target portals and encourages spreading out. And you can even monetize it with some kind of purchased shard item. Once the free micro-shard event is over, you can insert a purchased event shard (1 blue, 1 green) to reset the event.
I'm not sure what the incentive would be for wining such an event, but it sounds fun. From what I remember, the main point of moving Ingress to Prime was so that all the Niantic games would be under the same development environment/engine. The mechanics would already be there. Timer and buy in from pogo. Flash shard generation and portal jumping from Ingress.
You may have a point here. But I can't help thinking that "around" the catching game, they managed to keep PoGo interesting enough to bind players to them by adding features, holding events. I don't see that happening in Ingress at all, and I fear the only way is down for the numbers of players.
My question is, what prevents the Ingress from doing the same? and get profit from the sale of souvenirs on anomalies?
And by the way, yes, why has the niantiс representative never written anything here yet?
About sales, local selling laws apply. Also, this has been discussed in the past: anomalies rely on voluntary work, so making money from it sounds just wrong! Remote selling has also been tried but again local laws apply and this caused trouble in Europe at least.
We can have a discussion about additional events that nia can do to get some income. Or selling swag, items or more in game purchases via the store. But none of these should change the basic nature of the game which was the original proposal of this post by moving away from ‘just making triangles’. Ingress already has moved beyond just triangles with plenty other possibilities. And so far I have not seen two statistics which would validate this move.
a) how many old, seasoned and dedicated players would ingress loose by moving away from its core game mechanic? In comparison to how many it would gain/keep?
b) how long would these new players who suddenly like ingress because it turned into (for example candy crush) actually stick with the game?
Because what would the longterm gain be if you actually loose a good chunk of dedicated players whilst the new wave of players will only stick with it for a few weeks or months?
I have played for 6 years. And seen hundreds of players come and go. And a lot of them said ‘brilliant game’, ‘best game ever’ etc. And then played a few weeks or months and then stopped. Whereas the long lasting dedicated players and lovers of ingress for what it is in my experience are the ones willing to invest into swag, buying CMU, paying for visiting a NL van or anomalies etc.
In case there are any market surveys out there to say this proposed move will actually yield some long lasting benefit - then I am happy to support it. But so far not seen any of it.
nia recently done a survey on how much players would be willing to pay for a monthly subscription type of deal. Did they publish any data or outcome? Considering that I play every day I would be happy to pay £30 per month for the game. £1 or 1USD or 1 other local currency per day does sound perfectly fine to me. You pay more for a cinema visit, a pint or a sandwich. But unless nia is publishing some data on how big the actual player base is that for example spends 10h per week or more playing and hence how much money is required to cover dev costs etc - nobody knows how small or big the problem is.
In my opinion, they don't have a proper shop besides frackers, apex and keylockers. Weapons and resonators are obteinable just by farming, you can't sell something that you can have in the game already. On top of that, the items are really expensive, but the offer they have just make the 8th of August was quite good.
I like to see they are learning to make suitable offers to the agents.
Why can I buy the official Simpsons or Spongebob iPhone cases but can't purchase any of the official game branded cases? What prevents to sell the attributes of the game on ibey or amazon ???
While money is spent, the reason why it's a 'free' game, is because none of that money goes to Niantic. Volunteer work is still volunteer.
Nia has a license fee for every sale.
Niantic gets paid when you put fuel in your car?
Niantic gets paid when you pay for a flight across country?
Niantic gets paid when your faction makes it's own swag?
Niantic gets paid when your faction has their own after party?
Niantic gets paid when you buy a booster?
No. Niantic doesn't get anything from the vast majority of the money we spend, and the time we invest in the game. Anomalies have always either run at a loss, or barely broken even, with all the volunteer support. Without it, we wouldn't have anomalies. I've been a part of enough of them to know that for certain.
Ingress is the most expensive free game you'll ever find, but it was never designed to make Niantic money directly.
yea thats why we were supposed to only have 1 anomaly location this year due to all costs and nightmares to setup all permits for hosting anomalies etc.... they werent happy with last years umbra anomaly how it turend out if iremember right but then covid happend so all physical events are not possible for a long time now.... even next year still very uncertain.....
maybe soon this battle beacons will be released we will see how that turns out mini battles at smaller scale..
First, learn how the economy works. Nobody will organize a holiday for you, print gift items if it does not bring income. Attributes can also be produced through third-party suppliers, but with a surcharge from the selling company.
I am pretty sure that @Perringaiden has got a very solid understanding on economics.
Or maybe there is a language barrier with irony and sarcasm.
I believe it was yourself who claimed that niantic gets a license fee for evert sale. And that is likely true. But only for items sold by nia or for nia by any official nia swag trader.
Niantic is not getting a penny for 99% of expense that most players encounter playing this game. Petrol, travel, hotels, beer, cake, community organised events, venues or swag. All these are earning niantic ZERO. The best nia can hope for is for players to meet up in numbers and buy some frackers from the store. Or maybe tickets for the official afterparty.
But these expenses are the smallest percentage of money spend on playing the game. That is why ingress is a free game. Surely not that difficult to understand.
Niantic is not the economy...
Niantic spent years paying for Ingress events out of the goodness of its heart and a desire for the game to prosper, because John Hanke has a soft spot for us.
Ingress was never designed to make a huge profit for Ingress. If you want an economic term look up "Loss Leader". It succeeded in its goals and we got PoGo.
If you look up the fate of Loss Leaders however, companies tend to end the projects after their purpose is served.
The biggest problem Ingress has is there's no revenue to get. The player base is shrinking. Very few dollars to get anymore. And why would a third party company invest to market with the Ingress game with very few hits? I'm shocked they are still running the game anymore. It can't be profitable to them. Pogo is their cash cow and that's where their attention is. And rightly so
media capsules has been requested i dont know how many years.... shop has very little interesting to offer today. frackers are too expensive and not worth it long ago. stuff like character badges could be in the shop and rotated every month or so. other cosmetic stuff that doesnt give gameplay advantages could be sold etc.....
im curious how much this battle beacons will cost once its released...