Telelinker ( Or whatever you want to call it, idea)
One of the biggest things we have been told that Ingress needs to succeed is financial security, and that Ingress struggles with this. This undoubtly puts a halt to some ideas for upgrades, or items within the scanner as anything that is done to advance or better game play, requires time, energy, and money. In speaking with @laughingwater , we discussed an idea that i wanted to put out there and see what the response would be with Agents and how it could be worked out if at all possible.
The idea is something like Kickstarter which ive named Telelinker for now. It would be a place where projects could be posted to judge 1- the interest in the project and 2- if it could be financially supported via Agents. I imagine a variety of things could be posted, like upcoming events to new items. Agents that support/donate to see these projects succeed could possibly get the items they support, if the items fully backed, first before they are posted for sale in the in app store for the rest of the players. Events of course would be different but maybe it could be something as simple as supporting/donating agents could get one supporter pack for the event they supported?
Again, this is just simply an idea and i obviously have no experience with how it could work but i feel like this could be a way to bring income into Ingress while also helping the community feel heard because ultimately they would be the ones donating to the ideas that become reality.
Comments
So, we pay Niantic to tell them what we want, so we can get it first, then have to later buy it from the store too?
We've posted countless times over the years, on G+, Reddit, these forums, ect about ideas of what could be profitable for Niantic. I'm not sure I really care to pay them to work on ideas we've repeatedly given them over the years. Would this idea give us actual communication with Niantic? I'm sure at this point, folks would pay for such a thing. Then again, better communication has been long promised, but never materialized.
I personally think it is unfair to ask for financial security from players to keep the development ongoing...They can try to replace the Ingress Prime Team or loan money from the bank.
I cancelled my core membership because after 2 years of me sending them money I don't see any more players in the game. If anything there's even less. I had hopes they would use the money from all of us to grow the game. But it hasn't come to fruition. So for me I just can't see how spending any more money to support them will help.
As the saying goes, you can only lead the horse to the water, but you can't make him drink it. If Niantic wanted to take the opportunity to make Ingress Prime financially viable; it would have done so by creating marketing collaborations with other companies out there, such as McDonald's, Kyoto Matcha, Gong Cha tea, etc, since most of the younger generation gamers tend to hang out in those places. However, Niantic's attention and resources are focused on their new game, NBA All-World. It's just a pity that die-hard fans of this game have to resort to a Kickstarter to keep this game afloat.