Brian's Blog: Sept 2019

Our mission when we launched Ingress in Nov 2012 is the same as our mission today — to help enable agents to set off on adventures on foot with others. When I talk with agents about their sitreps and stories, the common threads across them are connecting with others who share a passion for the game, and seeing the world through new perspectives. The game gives us reasons to come together, and it's the community that makes Ingress, Ingress.

A few years ago, a popular compiler or technology we leveraged was shut down. But more importantly, the original mobile app was designed in such a way that made it difficult for our artists and designers to make updates without extensive engineering support. Our move to Prime comes with tradeoffs, but it enables our team to more flexibly prototype and experiment, as well as adopt shared features across other Niantic games, like in-app ticketing with Events, which was extended with personal leaderboards in the recent field tests. We're listening to feedback from agents, and we'll continue to iterate on and improve the game.

I'm focused on our long-term sustainability — the sustainability of the in-game economy, the game mechanics, and the game itself — because I care a lot about Ingress and the community. It's why I came back to Niantic. Ingress has so much potential as a global, competitive real-world game, and I feel, in a way, that we're just getting started. I'm uncomfortably excited about where we're headed, and hope to see you out in the field.

Hack the planet,

Brian Rose

Comments

  • Looking forward to seeing what y’all come up with!

  • 1valdis1valdis ✭✭✭✭✭

    Can I ask, are the paid-only anomalies what you call "just getting started"?

  • I understand. That black screen with some dots on it would be too difficult to recreate. You had to create this busy screen with shimmery, seizure-inducing portal descriptions.

    And yes, anyone can haz my stuff.

  • Looking forward to more blogs like this!

  • Any initiatives to reverse agent numbers decline?

  • MuzzgoodMuzzgood ✭✭✭
    edited October 2019

    My 2¢: Include 50+ players with 50+ eyesight, include older phones; make GPU intensive animations optional/throttle CPU usage, include small screens -no reason to throw away a perfectly fine iphone SE and smaller form factor rugged phones perfect for the field tend to run older OS versions and are not good on cooling. And skip the purple if the game is about blue or green -or make skins optional might help people that needs strong contrasts/have seizure problems! Thx for a great game!

    Post edited by Muzzgood on
  • Looking forward to things ahead. This was good to read as it keeps me more confident that Ingress is where I also think it is, almost not even started. Today im going to recurse again for the 4. time(or is it 5. ? badge now says 3, so Ill make it 4... and go on with my 5...) 🤣

    Have heard rumors that recursing will stop, hope not. But I would love some tier on recursing. But maybe on a new badge so that it does not hurt the agents that have recursed one time and are OK with that.

  • Just plans to give Pokemon Go portal review access so we're not needed anymore :P


    Players are always coming and going depending on life circumstances. I don't personally know any agents quitting because of prime and anomaly ticketing is irrelevant for 90% of players.

  • I know some because of Prime. But I think they will return. They dont quit chats... thats a way of saying they are still in the family.

  • There has been a steady decline in active agent numbers for the past two years, I'm not talking about Prime and regular churn of casual agents. The number of active agents has been steadily in decline - to the point that Prime, anomalies and IFS are irrelevant to the discussion. How are the number of agents going to increase and when can we expect to see this turn around?

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