The PoI database doesn't excuse Ingress not making money

ComChanseyComChansey ✭✭✭
edited September 2019 in General

It's mega valuable, don't be fooled. But every contribution has been voluntary, out of a want to improve this free to play game. We aren't owed anything for getting points to play this game at added.


It's obvious that Niantic is working very hard at making PoGo more self-maintained by giving Germany submissions just to see what would happen to OPR when you increase the number of submitters exponentially in an area with a good number of portals. I believe that PoGo players could be added to OPR just fine if they limited it to 50 or 100 million+ XP players, increased the threshold for acceptance, and gave everyone Floral Crown Raquazas for 95% agreement rates. Maybe even add paid auditors and limit reviewers that go against them with money saved axing Ingress.

But enough of other game. My point is that Ingress needs to make money, and if it doesn't Niantic can phase it out and survive. It's not a slap in the face to anyone who has submitted anything ever to try and sustain this game by itself. Especially when people from other games pick this up or buy accounts just for that privilege

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Comments

  • ComChanseyComChansey ✭✭✭
    edited September 2019

    Okay, make it Shiny Floral Crown Mega Rayquaza then. People are only mad about Eevee since they ~aren't~ recycling legendaries for breakthroughs. Also, I might just be throwing out a half sarcastic half serious example. But my point is that they could absolutely use a good Pokemon as an incentive for doing OPR right, especially for collectors.


    What betrayal? I must have missed the part where Niantic only lets people with 100 approved submissions attend Anomalys. The only relationship there is when it comes to submissions is one where Niantic implements approved candidates in their games. Mutually beneficial.

  • From Google:

    "Betrayal is a loss of trust that can stem from subtle actions, like telling a white lie, to large scandals such as embezzlement. Feelings of betrayal can occur when there is dishonesty or perceived dishonesty and can coincide with feelings of disappointment or unmet expectations."

    Dishonesty or perceived dishonesty? Yes

    Disappointment? Yes.

    Unmet expectation? Yes.

    Both of you **** definition of betrayal.

    Also, the point of contribution is to improve the game people enjoy. The initial premise is "people enjoy" and if they fail to deliver that by whatever reason from ruining the sportsmanship, directly or indirectly inflicting loss of enjoyment and calling their player base self-entitled whelps who should shut up about their Epic store exclusi--oops, wrong game that's Metro Exodus but sure, learn from the example. That sure ended well for the company whether they are in the right or not (which, in their case, was totally fair wanting a better dividend but you imagine the players couldn't care less).

    Marketing and PR is like that, you can't handle the unreasonable and relentless demands of the market, you go home and someone else, most likely in China, will be gladly filling in your shoe.

    I'm just so glad the vocal minority does not represent Niantic else, they would be in for one hell of a ride.

  • MaliciousWolfMaliciousWolf ✭✭✭
    edited September 2019

    That is the definition of betrayal, you are correct, your point though?

    This still does not mean Niantic betrayed anyone, as your write it, you all just have the "feelings of disappointment or unmet expectations". This in turn, as written in the definition you have shared, means you all have "feelings of betrayal". Feelings of betrayal does not equate to the actual act of betraying, as in your definition to cause betrayal is to cause a loss of trust, Niantic never did anything to lose your all's trust though. If you do in fact believe or feel you have lost trust in Niantic, and thus were by definition "betrayed", then your perceived sense of trust is flawed and self serving.

    What do I mean by this? Well it is no different than lets say someone saying they don't trust their government or elected officials because they are imposing an increase on tax to fund public services like EMS or law enforcement. Just because you may not want to pay the increase in the tax, to say you no longer trust your officials because of it is unfounded when the public record clearly shows the increased tax revenue being spent on those public services during the annual budget.

    Niantic is charging for anomaly events to help keep Ingress funded. If Ingress, a service you use, is no longer funded then it will be shut down. If it is shut down, you can no longer use that service. Yet here, you have lost trust in Niantic? That makes no sense, it is unfounded, they are charging so they can keep the game running so you can keep playing it? That if anything is the most trustful thing they can do, trying different ways to keep the game funded and running so you can keep playing it.

    It would be untrustful, and thus an act of betrayal, if they just up and gave up on trying to fund the game and instead just decided to shut it down entirely and save some money on not having to waste resources or time on Ingress especially when the community they are trying to support is so cut throat with every little thing they try to do.


    This right here is the very picture of an entightled statement. You were NEVER FORCED to volunteer! Yes I know the volunteer work was time consuming and tough, but you were NEVER FORCED to volunteer! You and everyone else choose to volunteer, from there no matter how much time or resources volunteering REQUIRED, it does not matter, because once again you volunteered! This was never FORCED! Niantic owes you nothing. Niantic can charge what ever they want.

    Post edited by MaliciousWolf on
  • if niantic had simply announced that the next round of anomalies will have an entrance fee and no free ticket - there would be no problem. we would not be here, there would not be such fury, rage, and that sense of being used people are venting about.

    majority of the people who are angry are not angry at the cost - they are angry at the way the cost was presented.

    when you back people into a corner and make them feel helpless to get a thing, they react poorly. the word for that is extortion.

    this was very poorly done, and niantic should be ashamed of themselves for it.

  • I do not write the definition, I pasted it word-for-word from Google. Don't make it look like I twist the definition to fit my advantage. I ask you to present yours and that's about it. In fact, nice strawman you're attacking there.

  • Dishonesty? Disappointment? Unmet expectations? There's reasons to feel these from the Anomaly snafu, but that doesn't apply to submissions and OPR. It's fun to adventure and find new things to submit, and the reward of 500AP a portal has never been a nudge towards doing it if it's not enjoyable.

    The most common response to "How can Ingress make money?" is by far "It doesn't have to because of the value of the database to Niantic's successes." Like we can't be replaced.. again, I personally first started this game to make PoGo better in my area. People want to do this of their own accord. They have no shortage of volunteers for other games, and I've outlined a very realistic implementation of Operation Poke Recon.


    I love Ingress now and drive hours some nights to do BAFs in my low activity area. The fracker bump I still feel, but I don't resent Niantic for it. We're replaceable, they just really want to make Ingress justifiable. To me, this game shutting down would be a true betrayal.

  • @MaliciousWolf

    it doesnt matter who volunteers, what is germane to this conversation is the volunteer work is required before the thing is authorized. getting the local tourism board to be involved in writing and so on - niantic doesnt do it, and until someone voluntarily does it on their own time, the event will not happen.

    dont think for a minute i am wanting anything personally - my time was always given freely, and i dont regret it, nor would i do it any different.

    but niantic events have historically relied upon a huge investment of required volunteer time before they will go forward with authorizing the event - its not about me and never was, despite you wanting a target to punch at.

    where do you think we will be when no one is willing to put in the time, and niantic has to hire staff to take over all those hidden behind the scenes volunteer hours - every event is like a micro business, thousands of hours of unpaid labor necessary to pull it off.

    you think there are financial issues now? just wait.

    everyone makes mistakes - niantic made a big one here. it wont be the end, but the players are going to be hyper vigilant going forward to being taken advantage of.

  • DigitalisDigitalis ✭✭✭
    edited September 2019

    @MaliciousWolf and just to be clear, i would willingly continue to donate my time to niantic events if one were happening in my area - after helios i refuse to allow my name to be put on it. its not about credit its about community.

    ive got a lot of history invested, but someone else has to take the lead. if no one steps up i cannot help. i dont have the blocks of time at once my life allowed before.

  • Ingress and its PoI database were instrumental for PoGo and HPWU. No doubt about that. Without Ingress, no PoGo.

    But before Ingress, there were Field Trip (Niantic's first app), and Panoramio - at the time, a sister Google company. Field Trip was Niantic's first take at AR and provided the waypoints database for missions. Panoramio provided an early PoI database - remember the pictures that went missing about two years ago? They were Panoramio portals.

    Both Field Trip and Panoramio are now dead and gone, and I don't want Ingress to follow the same path. Which means it has to be sustainable on its own, not because of its past contribution to another application.

  • I don't disagree.

    What I will say though, pana provided 'few' poi's, ingress still provides poi's.

  • MaliciousWolfMaliciousWolf ✭✭✭
    edited September 2019

    Nice red herring through an ad hominem there... I'll bite though...

    You have taken what I have written out of context, I never asserted you /wrote/ the definition, rather I was using the term 'write' literally, as in you typed out (or in this case copy/pasted) the definition of betrayal. I also never asserted you were twisting the definition to your advantage, rather I was asserting that your very use of the term itself was unfounded given the definition of the term. You are correct, though, in that you only asked others to provide their definition for betrayal; however, as we know I did not decide to provide my own as your definition was sufficient, rather I decided to use the established definition to argue my stance that your use of the term betrayal was unfounded. This was to back up my earlier argument that Niantic never betrayed anyone.

    Fair points, and I apologize for my earlier misunderstanding regarding your response being centered around you yourself. The way you made it a point to discuss how difficult the entire volunteer process was made me believe you were talking about your own experience in volunteering, and not in fact a generalization of all the experiences of all volunteers. As much as I do not like to see the use of generalization, I hate more than anything assumptions being made which I have done so myself here.

    If no one wants to volunteer then there will be no more events I would argue to continue your discussion on that front. In time, this may or may not negatively impact cost, as I am unsure how much money it actually costs Niantic to aquire permits for some of these public spaces, or general costs for their own hosted events. We can agree on the notion they need funding, and that their handling of charging for anomoly was done poorly, but the act of charging for anomoly events (among other future events) is where we still face disagreement. I believe charging for the anomoly event, even the one coming up here in a month, is appropriate and neccessary for reasons I have already previously argued.

  • ..... hmmmm ..... why are players 'entitled'.... And a company that gets countless hours human work for free not 'entitled'

    ...... ingress is more than just niantic it's a community

    Why shouldn't ingress community not recieve 'royalties' from past work? I'm not interested in trivial arguments such as you didn't have to do free work. Work has been done by thousands of people with inherent expectations that work would count for the community.

  • Because the company runs a free to play game that isn't pay to win and players think that contributing places to play the game means the game doesn't have to make money.

    Because players in the other games would do the exact same thing for free, and have picked up Ingress just to do it. It's mutually beneficial

  • Ingress is not just the game provided by niantic. The networks that have been set up by folk to fill the gaps are worth a lot and do a lot. Are those systems magically going to going to be sustained without ingress I don't think so.

  • Niantic has tapped into a rich vein of open source community minded folk.. .... And it doesn't seem to know how to engage with that with respect.

  • Yeah, they will be. Do you honestly believe that they don't plan on making OPR available to PoGo players? Ingress has to make money once that happens. Or else it'll be the next Panoramio/Field Trip

  • Have you seen how pogo centric players submit POIs? They miss 2 thirds of POIs.

    There is no real wander lust like they have ingress. That explorer badge is an amazing incentive.

    My city has added 10000 portals on top of the 19000 pre-existing portal database since reopening of submissions. I think that's pulling weight.

  • ComChanseyComChansey ✭✭✭
    edited September 2019

    They hit 100% of the ones that line up with the game's cell rules 🙄

    Only problem there is that ingress and WU dwarf in comparison to pogo so those points are lower value, as long as they keep the density limitations in place.

    Ingress is cooler but that doesn't make it more valuable if it doesn't make money

  • But that's where we disagree Ingress is making Niantic a lot of money with past and present 'free' labour.

  • The PoI database does. If ingress loses its status as the only way to update it, which is inevitable, then it'll die if that's the only model it makes sense to keep under

  • I agree. If Niantic is unable to find or impliment a consistent revenue stream for Ingress, Ingress will be shut down soon once POI utility is fully implimented into PoGo regardless of their community standing. It makes more finanical sense to stop wasting resources on an old intellectual property that no longer offers anything useful to bring to the table (currently this is POI).

    Instead, have what is left of your development team for Ingress consolidate with the PoGo and WU teams to make those more popular games even better and generate more revenue than they already do, which is much more revenue than Ingress will ever generate.

  • .... hmmmm I think the Linux like versions of ingress are just around the corner.... the section of the ingress community I'm familiar with kinda has that open source loving/contributing vibe...

    a profit or **** mindset is not always a good motivator.

  • It's clear some in the community will support the profit or **** corporate mindset.

    Kinda in the not going to be exploited mindset. If my work is going to only be accessible via paying for it then so long and thanks for all the fish.

  • GoblinGranateGoblinGranate ✭✭✭✭✭

    I guess there is just too many people who find joy in preventing others having theirs.

    About the extra cost, I don't really see a true reason to freak out: if you can afford playing ingress and attending an anomaly, you can afford the extra cost.

    @Claudija made a very importan point in the open letter about local salaries and I'm sure Niantic can afford lowering the costs based on which anomaly you are attending, thing that (as I'm told) is already being checked.

    I'm ok with the extra cost, but I feel like they should just include the badge in the packs already existing. Maybe create a new, lower pack for people not interested in packs?

  • "Both Field Trip and Panoramio are now dead and gone, and I don't want Ingress to follow the same path. Which means it has to be sustainable on its own, not because of its past contribution to another application."

    I do see it as inevitable that as more and more portal network functions move to other games, and Niantic fails to monetise Ingress (should really have thought of that before, right?), Ingress players become less and less valuable for the company. What happens then? I don't know, but what we do know is that Niantic can keep outdated software services on-line without development and updates if they wish to do so.

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