The next movie isn’t until June 2023 if I am looking right? Which I guess it would make sense to tie into a film release (I think if HPWU was still going, it would have benefited from Fantastic Beasts movie tie-ins) but that’s a long wait.
I would think it would make sense to keep the closed beta going and then fine tune & tweak with a few additional countries so it’s ready for that 2023 release if so. Funny thinking it was meant to launch in 2021.
Of course, we don't know what really happened because it is a contract between companies.
However, it was originally scheduled to go public in June 2022.
However, given the fact that it was postponed for a year, etc., it seems more natural to assume that Paramount and Hasbro have canceled their partnership with Niantic if the cancellation is true.
Normally, it is not natural for a developer to terminate three months after launching in a new country.
And these are the weaknesses of games that use intellectual property.
No matter how big a hit a game is, if the company that owns the intellectual property declares it cancelled, it's done.
I don't think it will be cancelled, but the same goes for Pokémon Go.
If the Pokémon Company declares Niantic to cease and desist, that's the end of it.
There’s been no official announcement as yet. Just that someone at Bloomberg was passed an email.
It also seems weird that it claims they cancelled “Snowball” as that’s a thing in AR Voyage and I don’t think it’s a separate app? So maybe some wires got crossed there.
@tp235 means June 2021 also, which is when it was announced and then never met 2021 goal and had a small update in the comments of the MeetYouOutThere video saying it was coming in 2022.
I wonder what went on behind the scenes if it is cancelled. It doesn’t give much hope to future Niantic games like NBA All World & DarcARys
@Grogyan I'm not sure that your conclusion fits the data. Most startups lose money for a while until they build a strong enough revenue stream, and Niantic was probably running at a loss until PoGo became a hit. IIRC Niantic's only significant revenue from Ingress came from sponsorship deals and I seriously doubt that covered the cost of building, running, and marketing the game plus corporate ovehead.
If you don't diversify, then you are losing money.
Ingress was doing pretty well, the sponsorships enabled this, the data showed that Ingress was profitable. Which is how the sponsors were able to keep coming. This was only the case because Ingress was the only game they had.
But to keep saying that Niantic should only make money from pogo, to pay for everything all the time is just silly, and makes no financial sense as a business model.
The problem Niantic finds itself in is that there will never be another game as popular as pogo. And it is already proven that the income from Pokémon GO has dropped to significantly low levels that they are having to let go of staff. Because they put most of their financial income from pokemon go. Because they are simply NOT marketing anything else.
This is a failure of their marketing department.
So for a franchise like Ingress to be profitable, needs a strong marketing team to ensure that advertisments and articles talk about Ingress (and other games) at the same level.
Don't know about anyone who else, but I am pretty sick and tired of the number of ads for pokemon go, even though I have uninstalled the game.
I simply do not get ads for Ingress, or Pikmin. Which speaks for itself about Niantic's marketing decision making.
People aren't realizing the money that Niantic makes isn't available assets. It's a pot of money that has to sit and wait for whatever was agreed with not just The Pokémon Company but also Nintendo. There's also the angel investors who have also provided funding whether it's for a quarter or a year.
Who knows when it's available money but they still have to pay money to do whatever. This actually isn't just Niantic. It's the reason why companies have canceled things because it's something of lower interest or priority.
@Grogyan What data showed that Ingress was profitable? I don't think we have access to Niantic's financial information and I've never heard them state that it was. Based on my experience working at internet startups for a couple of decades I think it's unlikely that Ingress was profitable but I'm open to evidence.
I'm not arguing that Niantic should only make money from PoGo, and I absolutely don't think that's true. I'm just trying to understand why you think Ingress was profitable since intuitively that seems wrong to me.
Omission of available information doesn't imply they were in the red. We could probably assume they didn't have a bankroll until 2015 because they were under Google previously.
Is it a reflection that the Niantic Games were one trick ponies wherein the current games are not profitable anymore? Really not surprising news, though.
@MoogModular I've worked in the tech industry since the 80s, and in San Francisco/silicon valley since the mid 90s... mostly at startups. I've had a single-digit employee number at one company and have come in at around #30-300 at others. I've studied the financials of quite a few more, and have friends who are or have been VCs and individual investors. I was in the epicenter of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s/early 2000s and watched a whole bunch of Really Interesting Stuff happen including some successes, lots of failures, and some epic flameouts. Let me walk you through what I see.
Niantic's Series A round was $20M in funding from Google, Nintendo, and the Pokemon Company in 2015. In early 2016 they got another $5M from some smaller investors, at a pre-money valuation of $150M, for a total of $25M in the A round.
In November 2017 they closed a $200M B round that included six different funds, at a pre-money valuation of $1.8B, bringing the total to $225M.
In January 2019 they closed a $245M C round that involved six funds and one individual investor, at a pre-money valuation of $3.7B, bringing the total to $470M.
In November 2021 they closed a $300M D round from a single investor, at a pre-money valuation of $8.7B, bringing the total to $770M.
My analysis is this: I am almost 100% certain that they were running in the red before PoGo launched, and living on the first round of capitol. The B and C rounds probably funded investment and growth, including a dozen acquisitions and a few strategic investments. The D round feels a little weird to me, but it's consistent with them spinning up and shutting down multiple money-losing games. It's also fits with Hanke's statements about the layoffs.
I feel like they're pinning their future on super fancy AR experiences. Whether that will be a winning strategy or not is certainly an open question.
Not wishing to go against the pitchfork brigade. Love you 😘
There has been a few posts in this thread questioning the article posted e.g. transformers hasn't had a closure notice but they are launching in Malaysia
So the question is. Is this all pure speculation from the media? Who knows?
What I would like to theorise is that Niantic have acquired several other companies in the last few years, could the "lay-offs" have been in back office staff (hr, finance,customer service etc.) of the companies they have acquired by bringing it all under one central team?
I worked for a large organisation in the U.K. that merged with another large organisation and we had 2 of every back office role. The result 35% of the staff were made redundant (lay-off)
Pure speculation on my part as no one knows what is actually going on.
The nagging doubt I have is that if it wasn't true wouldn't they have already come out with a statement saying "media article is bs"
Niantics biggest problem is simple, they think they know what people want, rather than listening to what people want (ignoring home portals/pokestops). This is shown time and time again with how often they try to fleece the pogo players who buy tickets for things (recent examples being corsola odds not being boosted during johto day despite bei g only find in raids, so people were paying a lot to raid for it, and the shiny rates being baaaaad in the world go fest weekend, despite selling the availability of shinies as part of the ticket). And even on the ingress side, with r7 going back to one per agent, they didn't even open up discussions to find out if its what people wanted or not, they just went ahead with it (and presumably will return to 5 minute cooldowns that will be the final nail in the coffin for a lot of players). Niantic need, need NEED to get communication sorted and actually listen to its player base, they are the ones who give money/data
It is important to judge by logs, not by people's opinions.
People will not say anything against you, because they will not say anything that will be detrimental to you.
Niantic is developing a game that is designed to get people out, and Niantic will not be able to give people what they want who will only say what is to their advantage.
Here is an interesting article.
It is probably the most recent interview that CEO John Hanke has sent out.
It is in Japanese, but you can read it if you translate it at DeepL.
In it, he says, "If you don't move your body, you don't have the experience of playing.
We're just going to focus on what we do for people who can go outside. There's already plenty of content for people who can't or don't want to go out, so there's no need for us to make a 35th Pokémon game for people to play at home. There are already plenty of great Pokémon games on Switch and DS.
Now Niantic sponsors other companies (app developers). They mentioned it at the end of several Lightship 2022 sessions.
Transformers used the Niantic platform, but not Niantic developers. From the original announcement https://wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/new/criteria/eligibility June 14, 2021: "We’ve been working super hard on this with Seattle-based Very Very Spaceship as the development studio. " @tp235
Lastly: In the Information Technology (IT) world, "layoffs" means moving from employees to contractors. They get rid of people they have to pay benefits for (vacations, insurance, payroll taxes, etc), and hire someone they have no obligations to. My employer speaks of "8:1", meaning, we can hire 8 overseas IT contractors, for the price of 1 IT employee onshore. Also, always ask: What are IT-salaried people doing that we can break off to someone with lower pay? Documentation, scheduling, etc.
I agree with your perspective above. Niantic's inability to communicate and listen to its players reflects in the churn in the number of their players. Then the company wonders why their players are not enthusiastic about helping them do their portal scans too. Once they have the data from those portal scans who will benefit from that data besides Niantic? Their other paying clients that advertise on their games such as PoGO?
What's best for the game? Surely what's nest for the game is the players, amd if they aren't happy and feeling ignored, then they won't play, that's just logical. I'm not saying that they should put it onto easy mode but if people say they overwhelmingly like something the don't take it away, whereas of they don't like somethung in the majority dont push it
I'll start by saying g its very insulting to say "just go play another pokemon game". Second, I think you might want to read what I posted, it wasn't about home stops (in fact, I said ignore those comments) I instead brought up false advertising/shady marketing. But even ignoring all of that, it wasn't about moving, it's about lack of communication in general, let's take r7 double deploy, while you could argue one way or the other, I think most players were generally happy with double r7 deploy, but even if it was 50/50, the lack of any discussion from Ingress is a horrible way to go. It will be even worse when the hack timer conversation comes around, because that I'd vastly more popular and actual sticks to your argument of moving more, yet again, wheres niantic being involved or having any meaningful discussions?
Noting here, that Niantic's flagship product is massively profitable right now. It's all the other games that attempt to copy it's success that are not working. Niantic is not in a bad revenue position, even if they ditched every other game. Firing staff because they're not on the profitable game is a sound business decision, if they're not planning to make other games.
Niantic's flagship product relies on the data mined by its game players. The data is sold to other companies and other marketing services as well. No wonder this company's CEO said their focus is people who can go outside and collect data for them. At least we can see the direction of Ingress Prime which is to be a data mining machine and for its players to be data mining zombies. Well, at least there is a new Kirby Game which is fun because it does not ask me to do free work so they can make money from it.
Related to this, it seems that the former Harry Potter: Wizards Unite community manager (known as HPWULola on those forums) and the (now former) Peridot community manager, NianticLola was also part of the 8% of cuts.
Transformers used the Niantic platform, but not Niantic developers. From the original announcement https://wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/new/criteria/eligibility June 14, 2021: "We’ve been working super hard on this with Seattle-based Very Very Spaceship as the development studio. " @tp235
In the current Information Technology (IT) world, "layoffs" usually means moving headcount from employees to contractors. They get rid of people they have to pay benefits for (vacations, insurance, payroll taxes, etc), and hire someone they have no obligations to. My employer speaks of "8:1", meaning, we can hire 8 overseas IT contractors, for the price of 1 IT employee onshore. Also, always ask: What are IT-salaried people doing that we can break off to someone with lower pay? Documentation, scheduling, wayspot approval, scanning, social media, etc.
Comments
The next movie isn’t until June 2023 if I am looking right? Which I guess it would make sense to tie into a film release (I think if HPWU was still going, it would have benefited from Fantastic Beasts movie tie-ins) but that’s a long wait.
I would think it would make sense to keep the closed beta going and then fine tune & tweak with a few additional countries so it’s ready for that 2023 release if so. Funny thinking it was meant to launch in 2021.
what has heavy metal to do with upcoming transformers movie when they canned the game ? dont get it..
Of course, we don't know what really happened because it is a contract between companies.
However, it was originally scheduled to go public in June 2022.
However, given the fact that it was postponed for a year, etc., it seems more natural to assume that Paramount and Hasbro have canceled their partnership with Niantic if the cancellation is true.
Normally, it is not natural for a developer to terminate three months after launching in a new country.
And these are the weaknesses of games that use intellectual property.
No matter how big a hit a game is, if the company that owns the intellectual property declares it cancelled, it's done.
I don't think it will be cancelled, but the same goes for Pokémon Go.
If the Pokémon Company declares Niantic to cease and desist, that's the end of it.
so the news niantic cancel transformers game is not true u mean ?
There’s been no official announcement as yet. Just that someone at Bloomberg was passed an email.
It also seems weird that it claims they cancelled “Snowball” as that’s a thing in AR Voyage and I don’t think it’s a separate app? So maybe some wires got crossed there.
@tp235 means June 2021 also, which is when it was announced and then never met 2021 goal and had a small update in the comments of the MeetYouOutThere video saying it was coming in 2022.
I wonder what went on behind the scenes if it is cancelled. It doesn’t give much hope to future Niantic games like NBA All World & DarcARys
Putting all your eggs in one basket is not a viable long term option for any business.
Also, people will pay for a game for as much as a game is marketed.
Ingress prior to 2018 was very profitable, with Niantic able to employ actors, and manage an ongoing and engaging story.
@Grogyan I'm not sure that your conclusion fits the data. Most startups lose money for a while until they build a strong enough revenue stream, and Niantic was probably running at a loss until PoGo became a hit. IIRC Niantic's only significant revenue from Ingress came from sponsorship deals and I seriously doubt that covered the cost of building, running, and marketing the game plus corporate ovehead.
@Hosette it is common for all businesses.
If you don't diversify, then you are losing money.
Ingress was doing pretty well, the sponsorships enabled this, the data showed that Ingress was profitable. Which is how the sponsors were able to keep coming. This was only the case because Ingress was the only game they had.
But to keep saying that Niantic should only make money from pogo, to pay for everything all the time is just silly, and makes no financial sense as a business model.
The problem Niantic finds itself in is that there will never be another game as popular as pogo. And it is already proven that the income from Pokémon GO has dropped to significantly low levels that they are having to let go of staff. Because they put most of their financial income from pokemon go. Because they are simply NOT marketing anything else.
This is a failure of their marketing department.
So for a franchise like Ingress to be profitable, needs a strong marketing team to ensure that advertisments and articles talk about Ingress (and other games) at the same level.
Don't know about anyone who else, but I am pretty sick and tired of the number of ads for pokemon go, even though I have uninstalled the game.
I simply do not get ads for Ingress, or Pikmin. Which speaks for itself about Niantic's marketing decision making.
People aren't realizing the money that Niantic makes isn't available assets. It's a pot of money that has to sit and wait for whatever was agreed with not just The Pokémon Company but also Nintendo. There's also the angel investors who have also provided funding whether it's for a quarter or a year.
Who knows when it's available money but they still have to pay money to do whatever. This actually isn't just Niantic. It's the reason why companies have canceled things because it's something of lower interest or priority.
@Grogyan What data showed that Ingress was profitable? I don't think we have access to Niantic's financial information and I've never heard them state that it was. Based on my experience working at internet startups for a couple of decades I think it's unlikely that Ingress was profitable but I'm open to evidence.
I'm not arguing that Niantic should only make money from PoGo, and I absolutely don't think that's true. I'm just trying to understand why you think Ingress was profitable since intuitively that seems wrong to me.
Omission of available information doesn't imply they were in the red. We could probably assume they didn't have a bankroll until 2015 because they were under Google previously.
Is it a reflection that the Niantic Games were one trick ponies wherein the current games are not profitable anymore? Really not surprising news, though.
@MoogModular I've worked in the tech industry since the 80s, and in San Francisco/silicon valley since the mid 90s... mostly at startups. I've had a single-digit employee number at one company and have come in at around #30-300 at others. I've studied the financials of quite a few more, and have friends who are or have been VCs and individual investors. I was in the epicenter of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s/early 2000s and watched a whole bunch of Really Interesting Stuff happen including some successes, lots of failures, and some epic flameouts. Let me walk you through what I see.
Niantic's Series A round was $20M in funding from Google, Nintendo, and the Pokemon Company in 2015. In early 2016 they got another $5M from some smaller investors, at a pre-money valuation of $150M, for a total of $25M in the A round.
In November 2017 they closed a $200M B round that included six different funds, at a pre-money valuation of $1.8B, bringing the total to $225M.
In January 2019 they closed a $245M C round that involved six funds and one individual investor, at a pre-money valuation of $3.7B, bringing the total to $470M.
In November 2021 they closed a $300M D round from a single investor, at a pre-money valuation of $8.7B, bringing the total to $770M.
My analysis is this: I am almost 100% certain that they were running in the red before PoGo launched, and living on the first round of capitol. The B and C rounds probably funded investment and growth, including a dozen acquisitions and a few strategic investments. The D round feels a little weird to me, but it's consistent with them spinning up and shutting down multiple money-losing games. It's also fits with Hanke's statements about the layoffs.
I feel like they're pinning their future on super fancy AR experiences. Whether that will be a winning strategy or not is certainly an open question.
Not wishing to go against the pitchfork brigade. Love you 😘
There has been a few posts in this thread questioning the article posted e.g. transformers hasn't had a closure notice but they are launching in Malaysia
So the question is. Is this all pure speculation from the media? Who knows?
What I would like to theorise is that Niantic have acquired several other companies in the last few years, could the "lay-offs" have been in back office staff (hr, finance,customer service etc.) of the companies they have acquired by bringing it all under one central team?
I worked for a large organisation in the U.K. that merged with another large organisation and we had 2 of every back office role. The result 35% of the staff were made redundant (lay-off)
Pure speculation on my part as no one knows what is actually going on.
The nagging doubt I have is that if it wasn't true wouldn't they have already come out with a statement saying "media article is bs"
We may not know if the Ingress team was affected but the Wayfarer team certainly was.
Niantics biggest problem is simple, they think they know what people want, rather than listening to what people want (ignoring home portals/pokestops). This is shown time and time again with how often they try to fleece the pogo players who buy tickets for things (recent examples being corsola odds not being boosted during johto day despite bei g only find in raids, so people were paying a lot to raid for it, and the shiny rates being baaaaad in the world go fest weekend, despite selling the availability of shinies as part of the ticket). And even on the ingress side, with r7 going back to one per agent, they didn't even open up discussions to find out if its what people wanted or not, they just went ahead with it (and presumably will return to 5 minute cooldowns that will be the final nail in the coffin for a lot of players). Niantic need, need NEED to get communication sorted and actually listen to its player base, they are the ones who give money/data
People will always vote for what's best for them, not for what's best for the game.
It is important to judge by logs, not by people's opinions.
People will not say anything against you, because they will not say anything that will be detrimental to you.
Niantic is developing a game that is designed to get people out, and Niantic will not be able to give people what they want who will only say what is to their advantage.
Here is an interesting article.
It is probably the most recent interview that CEO John Hanke has sent out.
It is in Japanese, but you can read it if you translate it at DeepL.
In it, he says, "If you don't move your body, you don't have the experience of playing.
We're just going to focus on what we do for people who can go outside. There's already plenty of content for people who can't or don't want to go out, so there's no need for us to make a 35th Pokémon game for people to play at home. There are already plenty of great Pokémon games on Switch and DS.
And the same goes for Ingress.
Wow, y'all are looking at a subset.
Companies are paying to use the Lightship database. Here are 8 : https://lightship.dev/partners/?hl=en
Now Niantic sponsors other companies (app developers). They mentioned it at the end of several Lightship 2022 sessions.
Transformers used the Niantic platform, but not Niantic developers. From the original announcement https://wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/new/criteria/eligibility June 14, 2021: "We’ve been working super hard on this with Seattle-based Very Very Spaceship as the development studio. " @tp235
Lastly: In the Information Technology (IT) world, "layoffs" means moving from employees to contractors. They get rid of people they have to pay benefits for (vacations, insurance, payroll taxes, etc), and hire someone they have no obligations to. My employer speaks of "8:1", meaning, we can hire 8 overseas IT contractors, for the price of 1 IT employee onshore. Also, always ask: What are IT-salaried people doing that we can break off to someone with lower pay? Documentation, scheduling, etc.
I agree with your perspective above. Niantic's inability to communicate and listen to its players reflects in the churn in the number of their players. Then the company wonders why their players are not enthusiastic about helping them do their portal scans too. Once they have the data from those portal scans who will benefit from that data besides Niantic? Their other paying clients that advertise on their games such as PoGO?
What's best for the game? Surely what's nest for the game is the players, amd if they aren't happy and feeling ignored, then they won't play, that's just logical. I'm not saying that they should put it onto easy mode but if people say they overwhelmingly like something the don't take it away, whereas of they don't like somethung in the majority dont push it
I'll start by saying g its very insulting to say "just go play another pokemon game". Second, I think you might want to read what I posted, it wasn't about home stops (in fact, I said ignore those comments) I instead brought up false advertising/shady marketing. But even ignoring all of that, it wasn't about moving, it's about lack of communication in general, let's take r7 double deploy, while you could argue one way or the other, I think most players were generally happy with double r7 deploy, but even if it was 50/50, the lack of any discussion from Ingress is a horrible way to go. It will be even worse when the hack timer conversation comes around, because that I'd vastly more popular and actual sticks to your argument of moving more, yet again, wheres niantic being involved or having any meaningful discussions?
Noting here, that Niantic's flagship product is massively profitable right now. It's all the other games that attempt to copy it's success that are not working. Niantic is not in a bad revenue position, even if they ditched every other game. Firing staff because they're not on the profitable game is a sound business decision, if they're not planning to make other games.
Niantic's flagship product relies on the data mined by its game players. The data is sold to other companies and other marketing services as well. No wonder this company's CEO said their focus is people who can go outside and collect data for them. At least we can see the direction of Ingress Prime which is to be a data mining machine and for its players to be data mining zombies. Well, at least there is a new Kirby Game which is fun because it does not ask me to do free work so they can make money from it.
Related to this, it seems that the former Harry Potter: Wizards Unite community manager (known as HPWULola on those forums) and the (now former) Peridot community manager, NianticLola was also part of the 8% of cuts.
Hopefully it’s not @NianticThia next.
Also on Transformers: Heavy Metal;
very very spaceship now list Hasbro as a former partner but still seem involved with Niantic.
They also removed any links to this page from their site.
Can you just announce that it’s dead already Niantic?
There you go:
https://community.tfheavymetal.com/discussion/352/transformers-heavy-metal-game-announcement/p1
Thanks. Sad to see if formally, but at least they’ve said now.
Another one for https://killedbyniantic.com/ then
Another person to add to the possible 8% layoffs (maybe they left for another reason? 🤷 )
The lead game designer for Peridot.
Transformers used the Niantic platform, but not Niantic developers. From the original announcement https://wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/new/criteria/eligibility June 14, 2021: "We’ve been working super hard on this with Seattle-based Very Very Spaceship as the development studio. " @tp235
In the current Information Technology (IT) world, "layoffs" usually means moving headcount from employees to contractors. They get rid of people they have to pay benefits for (vacations, insurance, payroll taxes, etc), and hire someone they have no obligations to. My employer speaks of "8:1", meaning, we can hire 8 overseas IT contractors, for the price of 1 IT employee onshore. Also, always ask: What are IT-salaried people doing that we can break off to someone with lower pay? Documentation, scheduling, wayspot approval, scanning, social media, etc.