Niantic has “organisational update”, closes NBA All-World. No mention of Ingress at all
PkmnTrainerJ
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Odd to share something that doesn’t mention Ingress at all but I am concerned
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PkmnTrainerJ
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Odd to share something that doesn’t mention Ingress at all but I am concerned
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They keep launching games that steal their paying customers from one game to the other game. They aren't expanding, they are just getting their own user base across multiple games.
"I have made the decision to narrow our focus for mobile game investments, concentrating on first party games that most strongly embody our core values of location and local social communities. " -- Besides Ingress being something they actually own themselves, its their "core values".
"Specifically, this means we will be closing our LA studio, reducing our game platform team and making additional reductions across the company. As a result, we will be sunsetting NBA All-World and stopping production on Marvel: World of Heroes. This means we are laying off around 230 Niantics."
"Why are we making this change?"
"The answer is straightforward – we have allowed our expenses to grow faster than revenue."
The Why Did this happen part is semi amusing. Maybe not pissing off your Cash Machine game players by upping prices?
"The top priority is to keep Pokémon GO healthy and growing as a forever game. While we made some adjustments to the Pokémon GO team, our investment in the product and team continues to grow."
blah blah blah
We spent too much money too quickly, didn't have the revenue to support it. e
Your first sentence is spot on. They are cannibalizing their own products...
I don't see how any company would still want to work with them given their track record
Apparently the market for AR games is much smaller than niantic anticipated.
That is their biggest problem. If they had 1-3 successful or even semi successful games, then sold their now cruddy POI DB to other devs, they'd be good. They keep trying to over reach thinking, oh yeah, lets get all those basketball ballers to play a game on their phone instead of being outside playing the actual game, or lets try to make money off this or that franchise.
Understatement. From my friends / co-workers / family members, those who play Ingress and actually want to go places and play are a very small amount. Those who play pogo, that's a bunch. But most of them don't want to go places to play. They want to do it at work, or home, or sitting in the car somewhere near home or work.
The problem is that companies across tons of industries saw HUGE gains during covid. People wanted to be outside, etc. Life is "back to normal" and those industries are seeing things flatten out or even dramatically decline. I ride mountain bikes and play disc golf, both of those are going through the same thing right now. It's like everyone just assumed profits would go up and up and up. Disc golf courses that used to be jam packed are now empty. Discs that sold out in minutes are now being sold at a discount because manufacturers assumed they hit the motherload. Niantic obviously fell into the same trap. Ingress is a ticking time bomb in my opinion, once the PoGo bubble completely bursts, Ingress is gone too.
The statement from John Hanke, shows the core of the issue
Advertising only pokemon go is their only strategy. Which is sole reason why they've laid off so many people.
Not advertising their other games
Brian seems to think that's our job. tell your friends and rank their game 5*...
Tell my friends to play this game with almost zero events with frequent lag, whilst they’re busy with a chock load of them in another game?
Well, they just admit it. Pokémon GO is the priority.
That's the problem with Niantic, they went all in one by doing PoGO re-skins hoping they could get the same success. They just failed to understand that PoGO only worked because "Pokémon". There's a reason why Ingress is losing players, it's the same reason PoGO would be another dying game if it didn't has pokémon on it.
It kinda looks like that John Hanke realized that. Let's hope is not another illusion.
No mention of Ingress because after 2024 Is done they will close the game is my guess, machina was a tool to stop people playing so they could close the game with fewer arguments.
Prime, machina, under-field linking, gear in store/carousel, etc.
Plenty of things that have stopped people from playing.
No surprise here. Niantic has kept trying to shoehorn different franchises into their AR platform without understanding why Pokemon Go has been the success it is. When you make a video game for video gamers, who have played this game their whole life on different platforms, they'll show up and try out your stuff. The core of pokemon was exploring a world and searching for things to collect. You just turned the map from stored into a Gameboy and made it the actual world. I would argue the remaining customers are addicts, not your normal run of the mill gamers who play a game to completion and then put it down.
Harry Potter people read books, you're making a big ask to get them to play video games. You would have been better off having them collect new pages to new canon stories to read within the app and put it together. There's no "hook" to keep people around or net new customers. It was just a bunch of "me too" existing Niantic customers rushing to be "first" and become the controller of their local community for the new game (like how owners of local discord servers for pokemon go communities became high in social clout).
NBA? Who that plays basketball in real life is a cross-section with video games?
Peridot? What people asked for this?
Settlers of Catan? Interesting idea, one of the better ones, but people who play board games want highly complex rules to manupulate strategies and look down on video games versus board games.
You're grasping for new markets with tools that don't fit those markets' desires.
If you want to find another well loved franchise that fits the AR platform you already have, Earthbound is pretty good, but old at this point, still might not have the same gamer base size like Pokemon had/has over time. Maybe you could shoehorn Ingress functionality into a Tron game. In the real world you exist, but in Tron you're manipulating The Grid, fighting off evil AI and fighting for the users. If you're willing to go more obscure, Shadowrun is a fantastic story and world which hasn't been tapped much. It's currently being played as a turn-based game in on Steam, I could see AR fitting in well with it.
Want Ingress to be more popular? It has to compete with PoGo in effort versus return. How about dropping fracker and beacon prices to 1/10th of what they currently are? you'd see more volume and use instead of people hoarding one or two of them and not buying new ones.
Realistically, the core values Niantic posted on their website when looking through their hiring process and company profile are just a copypasta of corporate virtue signaling and idealistic jargon. The most telling part of the hiring page is the following value:
Weather storms: We won’t always succeed, and that’s OK. When we fail, we look for how to improve, not who to blame."Now, you're dealing with the result of having too many people that constantly fail and aren't held accountable to their stakeholders. You can't live within a safe bubble and run a business. It's a business first, not a place to push your ideals. Groupthink is a major problem which is evident when you see some minor developments, but the real problems of lag and performance aren't able to be fixed. Ignore the problems, just keep doing the "fun" stuff in the business, not the hard stuff.
Ingress will be next on the chopping block, Approximately 6 months after they finish the last of the swag subscriptions and the community finally reaches its tipping point being charged 20 dollars per bio card ID badge during anomalies with 3 or 4 bio packages available at the same time (would have to shell out $60-100 for all of them, not to mention somehow spend all the included gear). That's the only real revenue stream Niantic has left in Ingress... Bio badges. But, that will eventually be exhausted. Already at most I'll buy one of the anomaly packs and then also subscribe to the kits. Even so, I'm only subscribing to the kits until my user profile in-game is long enough to rival some of the "old guard" players who try and use that as the "i'm better than you" comparieson like PoGo players compare rares/max stat pokemon counts.
I won't rehash the full text of other revenue stream ideas again... But I believe Ingress needs to revise the game into more of an esport and have each year be seasonal with competitive stats. Follow the same formula used in online games like overwatch/league of legends where players earn a rank each season such as bronze/silver/gold/etc based on their participation in the specific season. I covered this in a different post: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/21498/ingress-seasons. Otherwise you're just stagnating players.
The same can also be said for the majority of Ingress players. It's a small handful that will travel long distances for the game more than just once or twice.
I rarely agree with you, but this post is spot on, although I am unsure if Ingress will die so soon. Dropping item prices could help.
Niantic need to advertise their other games, such as Ingress and Peridot.
Community Days had zero knowledge of Ingress, we see no leverage of player sitreps/offers of help/zero social media advertising etc. XMA's and Ambassador feedback seems to meet deaf ears on the Ingress management side. USE THESE FREE RESOURCES.
Settlers of Catan COULD have been great - but it was way too simple. I wanted to build AR roads between towns (like Ingress Links) and it came down to basically a dull dice toss game.
Carcassonne - if well done, would be awesome as a Niantic game.
In summary - Niantic seem totally dysfunctional in:
Understanding their market
Marketing in general
Prioritizing development aims.
I also believe, apart from Pokemon, a lot of their games are simply diluting player base from their core games as people have pointed out above.
Hopefully this move by John Hanke is the kick up the back side that Niantic need. It's a shame to see Ethan go, who was a really great promoter of the game.
Are you really concerned about this?
I see you say and do a lot of things and bring up a lot of topics, but in the end you just think it's funny and don't seem to be concerned or expressing your opinion.
we are safe yay 👍
I did have concerns, absolutely. All the other games such as Pikmin Bloom, Peridot and of course Pokémon GO get mentioned by name, and then Ingress is left out of the announcement?
Followed by losing some key Niantic folks such as Ethan & Dominik, and we know that events and any Niantic communication have been very sparse. Could have easily been in wind down mode.
However, as shared by @mortuus above, we seem to be okay for now.
As for funny, it helps with the impact of any bad news, so yeah I do try and keep things light.
Now starting to see main news sites post about it.
BBC News states it was a 25% cut.
Pokemon Go maker Niantic cuts a quarter of its workforce
According to his LinkedIn, Brian Rose was based in LA.
I definitely see Niantic oversaturating their own market like Guitar Hero and Rock Band back in the late 2000s. Niantic's competition is Niantic. I wish they had actual competition to their own games because it would lead to some nice innovation to making a better game.
It's just what leads to a more solid gaming experience with Niantic games? I thought the height was Ingress, HPWU, and Pokémon because it didn't matter what interested you - your friends could be with you playing any of the games. You knew what the special POIs were. Pikmin Bloom is a nice step away from their usual games. I wish Catan came out but I think the company wanted to step away after covid.
I feel like this AR/VR is at a crux. Google moved away from it, Microsoft pretty much has done the same, Apple is still interested with it but that VR set is going to be another Google Glass where interest will be niche deep. It's a nice pipe dream.
It's just what leads to a more solid gaming experience with Niantic games? I thought the height was Ingress, HPWU, and Pokémon because it didn't matter what interested you - your friends could be with you playing any of the games
I have to very much agree with you on this @MoogModular
They all had their own quirks such as the skill tree in HPWU, and there wasn’t a lot of overlap with events. For example, even on days where all three had something on the same day, you could balance it.
Then for that whole day you’re still an active user of Niantic apps. Which seems like it should be a win for them?
Niantic were always busy trying to push new games, which would be played by people who already played the other games, with these games being the type that are forever games (can never really complete them) it's difficult to push that on the community. The community is the only thing keeping ingress alive, Every event in the event calender is community run. The events where people might spend money on micro transactions have vanished, my message to niantic is cut the pointless positions within the company and get a small team focused on the core games. Ingress could easily be a big player in the revenue if you'd put some real effort into it.
There is just so many games you can play at the same time. And community days that are on the same day/hour on multiple games doesnt work good really.
Its good that we know that ingress will continue as usual but it would be nice if they would actually start advertise it a little atleast and start doing global worldwide events with badge, afterall the last one we had was in march i feel a gap about every 6 months is ok for those type of events and nobody can feel burned out doing them every 6 months either and it gets even the semi casual players a reason to play for a badge you can collect and profit is increased to probably.
I think quarterly would be better. Or maybe an event that can be completed over the course of 2 or 3 different days in a quarter. Waiting six months between events is, just….a lot…
Yes it is but we dont even have badge event every 6 months i just used that as reference since we already got the q3 calendar and that type of event is missing so there went all hopes for that before we heading into november and its cold and grim in many parts of world and then we get the standard double ap and year 11 badge
I'd be curious to look back at the "golden years" of ingress to see how often they were doing events, medals or not. Mostly, I really enjoy the challenge aspect of events with a clear reward. Medal or not. Another reason I've been very pro-task system basically since I started playing in 2018ish. The day to day and tired out FS just isn't engaging for me. I know we can't do a huge event every other weekend, but dang, just need a little more here....
You can see last years Q3;
and 2021;
I think the “golden years” were very much Anomalies only. Which I guess they’re trying to recapture, but the players want other things too.
@Shottix , Niantic is shifting its direction to building an AR ecosystem that AR game developers and perhaps advertising will rely upon because of the data that Niantic possesses. Ingress will still be useful for expanding its AR ecosystem because of the portal scans submitted by some players.
The early years had anomalies, but they had them often and with more primary and satellite sites involved, including connected cells. This enabled many more agents to participate on site without having to spend a ton on travel, because the likelihood was high that something in the series was going to be relatively close.
Well.....
The price increase and nerf of remote raids is gonna bite niantic hard.... Thats their steady cash cow....to keep it flowing......