Monetize or Die
For a game to stay alive it needs to be commercially viable. Something that I strongly doubt Ingress has been for quite a while. No matter how much the higher-ups like ingress, there's only so long it can run at a deficit before someone has to pull the plug.
There comes a point where you need to monetize or die. The question is how to do that without ruining the integrity of the game. There are two major routes: Either sell boost/boons to the tiny fraction of cash-cow players, or run a subscription model.
A sub model ensures a steady, reliable source of income without directly injecting P2W to the store. It's how games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14.2 manage to exist for so long and keep everyone on an even playing field.
I would much rather everyone in the community chip in than have the game be more and more reliant on income from boosts like APex and battle beacons (Literal P2W features btw).
To those who are vocally against C.O.R.E: Accepting the premise of "monetize or die", what direction would you have rather ingress taken?
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I'm not sure what you're saying. You seem to be advocating a pay to play model, where anyone who wants to play needs to pay a subscription. Currently, there's is a major perk to subscribing - 500 extra inventory space. As long as subscription is optional, and it comes with extra inventory, it cannot be an even playing field.
It wasn't my intention to advocate for a full on P2P model. I should have been more clear, my bad. I only meant to compare monetizing your game around small but steady $ from a large portion of the community VS monetization by selling boosts and items in a shop (like you see in P2W games).
I think the ideal situation would be to keep ingress free to play with an optional sub that offers /bonus/ features for agents who think what the sub offers is worth paying monthly for. Bonus QoL features like key and inventory information on intel are perfect for this, but I completely agree the 500 bonus spaces is not. Inventory space is core scanner functionality and shouldn't be locked behind a paywall, much less a temporary one. Imagine waking up one morning to a lapsed sub and being 500 items overburdened.
There's a ton of potential for more intel features that are /bonuses/ to core gameplay agents would sub for in a heartbeat; IITC exists for a reason. IITC already exists but there's much potential forunique features only niantic can offer. Features like notification management: being able to disable attack notifications from hundreds of random uniques so only the important hits come through as pings. or a synchronized op planning interface. I can imagine a whole interface of C.O.R.E features the majority of the community would sub for that you would never otherwise think about if you're just playing the game.
I think they've taken a good route so far, though it's been slow and needs more still.
I'd like to see 8 paid-for kinetic capsules, but the free one is always available for people who don't want to pay too.
How can Apex and BB being P2W if to win in this game you must capture M.U., and those items only give you more AP, which after lv8 it barely relevant to make fields.
You can get "stronger" (more xm bar) faster, but just that, which isn't nreally a big deal since a lv6 can destroy a p8.
Winning is what you make of it and would argue that a lot of player's day to day "winning" is a successful AP grind.
It's not wining if not changing the scoreboard. Just to examplify: is it winning on poGO to pay to expand your backpack and pokemon storage system?
You're right that in the rules and written objective of the game, score is the one and only objective. But I don't think that's what players play for. Part of ingress' magic is how open ended it is. There are many different (Arche)types of players; some of which feel like they "won" when the AP bar moves up.
Frankly, I've been fielding less often because no matter how much AP I grind, I know in my heart I could have had double. A couple weeks ago I spent $30 to flip a BaF 29 times over my city. I doubled my lifetime illuminator total with 6 hours of work and now the stat has almost no meaning. My goal was 1B MU but now I'm just $90 and a night of key farming away from it.
That said I know I'm an extreme case. I think APex are ultimately a healthy addition for both niantic and new agents. Battle beacons are perfect as a purchasable minigame, they just need some tweaks.
Edit: oops, I didn't respond to your example. You're right, inventory space isn't winning, it's convenience. Rethinking my position I think selling inventory space as a permanent increase is totally in line with the purchasable lockers we already have. I mainly object to the space being temporary and a monthly thing.
PoGo is the multi hundred-million dollar annual cash cow that powers Ingress. Ingress is the game that created PoGo's base map and infrastructure to begin with. There is NO logical sense in suddenly cutting Ingress off and "compartmentalizing" it on NIA's balance sheet to force it to survive financially on its own because it does not turn a profit like PoGo. It probably costs NIA a puny 0.01% of their total net revenue to run Ingress. Brian Rose has done irreparable damage to Ingress, not the pandemic. There used to be 115 agents playing in my city on the Leaderboard 3 years ago. There are now 8.
EIGHT!
A cellphone game does not ALWAYS have to equal pay-2-win and in-app purchases. That's why I play console games - you pay once, and enjoy the ride. A new sequel comes out... pay once, and enjoy the ride. It shouldn't matter what electronic device the game resides on.
In Ingress, WE ALREADY PAID for the game.
We spent hundreds of thousands of combined hours reviewing Wayfarer Waypoints FOR NO PAY. We have done the physical legwork submitting Waypoints FOR NO PAY... and NO Seer MEDALS EITHER. Hell, before the pandemic, we spent our own time AND MONEY arranging Anomalies and FS events ON OUR OWN DIME!
So to say Ingress is a cost burden is a big, **** FARCE!
I'm sure that everyone involved with the project long term sees that logic too. The data ingress brought and continues to bring to the table is invaluable, but that alone won't sustain a game forever. I would think ingress costs a little more than 0.01%, A lot of man-hours and resources go into maintaining a game as a service. I mean, all those ingress exclusive links, fields, and portal statuses have to be stored somewhere. I don't think the server-host accepts the whole "Time = money" thing as payment.
The issue isn't with phone games; it's with games as a service. Ingress has staff and server costs to pay every month in order to be playable at all, the console games you talk about generally do not. They have already gone through 99% of their development cycle/total cost; when those games launch, they just have to sell enough copies to make a profit. It's like comparing going to the movies with a netflix sub, there's a reason they don't sell you a $200 lifetime membership.
Hubie has a point, we helped create the waypoint system, it's of immense value to Niantic, core IP asset.
However, those thousands of Poke players can now expand the network, (sure the quality is probably lower on average), but I am not so sure in todays corporate world how long we can live off good will from the company.
I'm really happy with paid subscriptions. Could tweak a bit but 100% this is a good thing.
The portal history feature has long been requested and is a fantastic addition.
Will we see this info in scanner and not just Intel?
From the news post: "Portal History will be added to the Ingress app in a future update".... soon™
Ahh missed that, thanks.
ALL OF THIS!!!!!!! ^^^^^^^^^^
I would not mind purchasing in game items if it was not for the fact that niantic is making it cost prohibitive when comparing the niantic games. Ingress is competing against Pokemon Go and yes a lot of players do play both. I have bought probably $30-40 of items in ingress and yes I have spent a lot in the other game way more than I probably should have. What I see the problem is niantic needs to find the sweet spot on free to play and micro-transactions even some of the recent decisions in the other game leave a lot to be desired when they are making a very decent profit. I am going to give some glaring examples how did niantic expect to see an increase in micro-transactions when they doubled the price of items in ingress but kept the same cost for CMU. Niantic did not do this in Pokemon Go they instead reduced the bonus bundle box options and reduced the discounts on the in store item costs. Why would anyone find justification to make a purchase on a 100% markup when the game did not gain features? The ingress shop is priced to the point how many are buying items in pogo that they would potentially buy in ingress if it wasn't 2x the cost on average? I mean the subscription is trying to fix a problem that was created by lack of competitive in game shop prices within the niantic portfolio. I would not mind paying up front costs for storage or key capsules. Maybe Niantic could offer 500 item space in the shop for say $25 worth of CMU and the other 500 with the C.O.R.E.S. allowing for a total of 1000 increased item inventory. I personally want permanent storage increase not dealing with a paywall if for some reason I don't have that $5 one month I don't have an inventory item crunch. How many people quit buying frackers when the costs doubled?
I haven't bought a single fracker since the price doubled. Right before that, I was buying a five-pack once weekly for weekend farm meetups over a two year period. Why did I suddenly quit buying (52x5 = $260) worth of frackers per year? Because NOTHING EXTRA WAS ADDED for the suddenly-doubled price. It was a pure price hike with no bonuses.
That's the quickest way to anger customers.
NIA could have doubled the output time or threw in a few extra frackers, but no - at the end of the day, you were suddenly paying 10 bucks for the same exact thing you were getting last week for 5 bucks.
Дорого дорого очень
@HubiePenguin I agree about the fracker price. I used to spread them around like candy. Doubling the price put a big crimp in that.
Ingress may have given PoGo, HPWU, and Catan World Explorer their map, but let's be honest about it. If Niantic shuts down Ingress right now, would any of these games feel anything?
There are vastly more Pokemon Go players than there are Ingress players. They can submit, review, or even scan portals if they feel like it. They spend more money on the game. Can you tell me one thing that Ingress player contributes uniquely to Niantic?
Yes, the amount that it costs Niantic to keep Ingress running is small compared to their revenue from Pokemon Go. But if you can cancel the expense without affecting the revenue, why not? Maybe John Hanke and some other original employees feel nostalgic about Ingress. But the investors, like Samsung and a bunch of other venture capitalists I've never heard of definitely don't. They see a few million dollars a year (pulling numbers out of my, erm, you know where) being spent on a game that's not bringing in money, will not be turning a profit any time in the foreseeable future, and can be shut down without affecting their cash cow. Why not save this money?
You don't compare Ingress with a console game. You compare Ingress with a MMORPG. Most of them require a subscription. Those that don't try to sell you things. If not enough people pay for it to keep the lights on, the game goes away.
The problem is Niantic has made so many mistakes with ingress that the game could be thriving if they would zero in on the basic issues. Monetization being one of them. It is hard to replace your playerbase when they walkaway due to bad communication. 2019 was a year that there could have been better ways to handle things. The quick swapping to pay to play anomalies without a decent notice, Doubling the price of the shop CMU item costs. These are not things that should have been done when they were switching to a client software stack that was very buggy. I personally feel that niantic needs to reinvest some of the profits that they have earned from the portal network into a full fledged ingress game with out demanding the playerbase to foot the costs due to a forced client change. I think the issue is they rushed into prime thinking the playerbase would pay more to support the game and it did not work. It is very hard when you start a game off as nearly full free to play then abruptly switch the model. I mean where are the advertisements or the attempt at bringing in new sponsors for the game? I have seen several advertisement campaigns for pokemon go on TV and other sources outside of niantic official channels. It really is almost like they want to keep the game going as they see there is an existing playerbase but they don't take the effort to grow the community or promote this game exists besides word of mouth or existing in game ad placements (aka sponsored poi) which haven't really seen new ingress in game in most countries in several years the U.S. has no national sponsor in ingress after circle k left just the softbank ultra link in game item.
Monetize or die can became monetize to ****...
I'm still orphan of the spiderman unlimited, that started getting like daily updates a new stuff to buy, etc until it go terminate. Of course it was a contract reasons (disney bought marvel), but it did improve to deaht in a series of questionable decisions.
But I don't believe the current subscription method and advantages are threat for the free players. The price is low and the advantages minimal. But being honest I would not care if they decide to create a bunch of new features exclusively for subscribers, and by doing not create unbalance, kinda of P2W. Why? Because CORE ingress elements have nothing to do with power. Even thy a entire faction is subscribed and the other not, the free players can still win. In my cell the smaller faction, with less active members and with zero lv8 farm was the winning one, usually about 35+ cycles each year. Why? Strategy. The rival faction having 2x the number of players and around lots of p8 couch farms didn't help them winning.
I'm all-in for future improves exclusively for subscribers. I'm not a fanboy, who throw my money at them, but also not a crying dinosaur afraid losing my nostalgias. 5usd is so little for most players that ingress could even migrate to fully pay to play without big losses.
Lets see next week and later on how many buys the subscription and how things will look in a month or two.
Lots to unpack here.
There is NO logical sense in suddenly cutting Ingress off and "compartmentalizing" it on NIA's balance sheet to force it to survive financially on its own because it does not turn a profit like PoGo. It probably costs NIA a puny 0.01% of their total net revenue to run Ingress.
It's been running at an almost 'total loss' for five years. PoGo now has all the tools to continue its own expansion of the map. Ingress does not run on the same servers as PoGo so the infrastructure isn't helping PoGo. Prime was developed using PoGo code, rather than the other way around. So the question of how much benefit Niantic has to keeping Ingress in play is questionable at this point.
Brian Rose has done irreparable damage to Ingress, not the pandemic.
@NianticBrian didn't start the fire. He didn't even fan it.
There used to be 115 agents playing in my city on the Leaderboard 3 years ago. There are now 8.
While this has been seen almost everywhere, the playerbase has always been boosted by community. The regions with better, more welcoming communities, and cross faction relations, have seen far smaller losses than regions with auto-pilot community or antagonistic cross faction relations. Ingress has always grown the most when players make the effort to build strong, welcoming, and inclusive communities.
A cellphone game does not ALWAYS have to equal pay-2-win and in-app purchases. That's why I play console games - you pay once, and enjoy the ride. A new sequel comes out... pay once, and enjoy the ride. It shouldn't matter what electronic device the game resides on.
An eternal game on any platform is always funded through repeated payments. Look at Fortnite, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, etc. If you like paying $60 for a new console game each year, then subscribe to Ingress. You'll pay $59.88 per year, to continue playing. And you'll probably get far more hours of gameplay out of it, than that $60 GTAXXVIII sequel.
We spent hundreds of thousands of combined hours reviewing Wayfarer Waypoints FOR NO PAY. We have done the physical legwork submitting Waypoints FOR NO PAY... and NO Seer MEDALS EITHER. Hell, before the pandemic, we spent our own time AND MONEY arranging Anomalies and FS events ON OUR OWN DIME!
A large percentage of the community doesn't even have gold Recon, so your claim is tenuous at best. Add to that the far larger PoGo playerbase with a far larger percentage of reviewers, and the problem comes in that while Ingress provides some non-monetary benefit, it's far far outshadowed by PoGo in pretty much everything we do. There isn't an element of Ingress that provides value to Niantic, which PoGo hasn't already also gained.
So basically, we've had 5 years of free ride from making PoGo, they've spent millions of dollars building a new Client and probably millions more just keeping the game switched on over that five years.
Niantic has repaid our pre-PoGo investment in kind. Now it's time for Ingress to at least cover it's own costs.
So to say Ingress is a cost burden is a big
On salaries alone, Ingress costs Niantic upwards of $2,000,000 a year just on direct staff. Add the cost of running the global network, in server processing, data transmission etc, and then the cost of things like office space, PCs for developers, etc, and the game is not cheap.
And sites like Sensor Tower list Ingress revenue at around $500k a year. So yeah, losing a few million dollars a year is enough to make any investor go "Something needs to be done".
"Monetize or die" isn't necessarily the best slogan, but it is a necessary evil, at least to the point of covering costs.
Timing. If EOS was a no go, CORE should be held too until things settle down with the bug. You're going to see far more activity, and likely in places it shouldn't be that active right now if access to CORE is given before northern hemisphere summer.
500 extra pieces of inventory is HUGE. It means hitting a ten portal farm to burn out and still having room left to hack some more. This should be held until north american summer unless things are that financially bad.
"While this has been seen almost everywhere, the playerbase has always been boosted by community. The regions with better, more welcoming communities, and cross faction relations, have seen far smaller losses than regions with auto-pilot community or antagonistic cross faction relations. Ingress has always grown the most when players make the effort to build strong, welcoming, and inclusive communities." - @Perringaiden
Perringaiden is SPOT On here - strong communities are the key to retaining and recruiting players. There's not as many joining as I used to see in comms all the time, but, there are still new people joining all the time. A strong community can reach out to the noobs and welcome them, encourage them, and grow them into competitive team members instead of letting them lurk out there as lone wolves until they get bored and move on to other things. If you are concerned about a dwindling player base, look at how well your community is handling this important part of the game. How did YOU become a part of the community? Is that same support structure still there? If not, can you help get it going again? The more agents we have involved in the game, the more fun it is for all of us, and the simpler the monetization becomes (costs get spread over a wider player base)- while we kind of have this pandemic enforced solitude, maybe we can all spend some time looking at our local community infrastructure and see if we can find better ways to be inclusive of new players so they get stuck into the game the same way we did. It's natural to lose some older players over the course of time. We did lose many over the switch to Prime. But we have to make up for it by recruiting new players and sharing our love of Ingress with them. The pandemic will pass eventually, we will be out there with each other again. Are we ready?