Above: Paresh Dave of the LA Times and John Hanke of Niantic Labs at GamesBeat 2016.
It was based around this notion that it would be a good thing if people got out of the house and wandered through their part of the city or to the other side of town and discovered things about it that they didn’t already know. The thesis was that it would be fun, that people would enjoy it, and that it would be generally good for cities if people were out using public spaces, maybe running into each other, maybe going to that park that’s near your house that you drive by every day and you never stop there. What would happen if people stopped there and used it? Would the park get better? Would people volunteer to clean it up?
It was admittedly kind of a wacky notion, to try to combine civic engagement, in a way, with a game. We didn’t want to do it in a heavy-handed way — “this is a good thing, go out and do this for your edification.” We called it accidental history. That was the internal moniker for it. Let’s just slip this stuff in. If you stumble across it and you happen to learn something about your community, you’ll enjoy it and it’ll be a good thing, but we won’t make a big deal out of it in the product.
We seeded the initial data set for Ingress with some of the content we had collected for Field Trip, which was a collection of historical markers across the United States, and a data set of all the public artwork where we had photographs and GPS coordinates. Statues in the park, that kind of thing. That was a few hundred thousand locations – museums, libraries. We wanted the game to work in small towns and big cities. And then we asked users of Ingress to find cool places in their neighborhood or city that they thought would be interesting spots to be portals in Ingress, places that had some interesting cultural attribute to them, that were visually distinctive. We asked them to submit those to us to be added to the game.
A lot of gamers really enjoyed that search for cool places, to try to find the unique spots in their neighborhood and get them past our filtering process and get them approved to be in the game. To a lot of early players, that was the game. Through that process, we went from a few hundred thousand seed locations, which kind of inhibited the number of people who could play Ingress in the early days — the map was not populated in many parts of the world. But over the course of two years and then three years, that got built out all around the world. We’ve had tens of millions of locations submitted and many millions of those have been approved and added to the game board. Ingress was ultimately able to be played in more than 200 countries.
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That global game data set got created from what people found were interesting things in their neighborhoods. We were able to use that to launch Pokémon Go in all the countries that we’ve launched it, and we’ll continue that roll-out really quickly, without needing to go through the months and years of building out that data set. It seems to be working. People are going out and exploring their cities, going to different places. There has been this whole phenomenon of — sometimes a local business is near one of these Pokéstops and they’re able to apply a lure to it, which causes the Pokéstop to spray out confetti and make Pokémon appear much more frequently.
GamesBeat: You have at least some data that that leads to more purchasing, perhaps, from businesses.
Hanke: We did early studies on that back in the Ingress days. Gamers will memorize the locations of these local businesses, they’ll visit them more frequently, and they’ll make purchases when they’re there. Then you see that ad hoc validation from all the small businesses that have adapted that strategy themselves, just buying lures through in-app purchases and applying them to Pokéstops nearby. Some of them have published ROI metrics around that. There are how-to guides for businesses about how to use Pokémon. That’s really cool. The power, if you will, is in the hands of the users and businesses that are savvy and want to take advantage of that.
Above: Paresh Dave of the LA Times and John Hanke of Niantic Labs at GamesBeat 2016.
GamesBeat: In the long term, do you see — you were saying you see these in-app purchases maybe not being the best way to make money compared to sponsored locations.
Hanke: We do both. But from the beginning we did want to try to grow a business that would be a complement to in-app purchases. I assume a lot of you guys are deeply into IAP and you know the challenges there. I just bumped into the CEO of Kabam. You have this tension, always, between game design and monetization with that model. It’s tough to be disciplined about it and understand where you want to draw the line between monetization and fun gameplay.
I grew up with computer games and video games. I love making them and playing them. We wanted to always preserve the integrity of game design if possible. We felt like it would be great to be able to complement IAP with a sponsorship model that was economically strong, economically viable, to take a bit of the pressure off IAP so that we could protect ourselves from ourselves. [laughs] We wouldn’t have to cave to that pressure to dial it up a bit more.
It’s in its early days. We have run that through Ingress. We have a number of global sponsors in that game. We launched Pokémon Go with McDonald’s in Japan. We’re talking to a bunch of other businesses that want to take advantage of that model for Pokémon Go in other parts of the world. It’s promising. Again, it’s early days. People have been talking about ads in video games for a long time. But this is a case where, because you’re able to draw people to physical locations, you can do something that not too many other forms of advertising can do. We’re excited about it.
GamesBeat: Users and businesses have sort of scooped you on this, but I think you said part of the business strategy was also holding events. How do events fit into the business?
Hanke: I come to this group of people and I know that a lot of you are probably very involved in things like esports. Events and games are becoming a huge deal, and not just in our particular category of games. Games are now socially mainstream. People want to connect with other gamers, not only online, but in the real world. We see that manifesting across all different parts of the industry. We’ve seen esports explode into this huge deal.
With our particular kind of game, it involved people going out and playing in the real world, playing with their friends and meeting new people. Events have always been part of the mix for us. We started with very informal meetups with Ingress, where we had—literally, we had our first meetup with about 45 people. Just observing that people were thrilled to come together and meet other people who were into the same things as they were and share experiences with the game.