I'm the opposite, how can they fail with a game that reportedly [0] took $1.21B in revenue last year (well past its zenith, as you point out) and by its nature it's fixed (doesn't need any development).
It seems like it's going to be 200:1 profits to expenditure with those numbers.
You've got to do things seriously badly to mess that up??
I picked up pogo after a few years. They actually seem to be doing quite a bit of development .. lots of locale specific events, weather warnings, more than 151 pokemon, raids, etc.
Huh, I went back to it after almost 6 years (first played it when it came out, then after a couple of weeks they changed the app and it wouldn't run on my phone any more) and it seemed almost identical to me. Yes, some more automated events, the integration of weather, but nothing else noticeably different (?) [to me, as yet].
I played it when it came out, and it was awesome. Many people where on the streets, best summer.
Then they blocked the apps that made finding Pokemons easy and all the people were gone in less than a week. I was baffled how they managed to destroy a global phenomenon in such a short amount of time.
But, yes, I remember, a few years ago, I met a buch of people who still played it, but they seemed to be Pokemon fans and not members of the public. So, it essentially became a regular Pokemon game played by the usual suspects, I guess.
Which isn't bad, I mean, Pokemon is basically the MCU of games. But compared to the summer it came out...
The VC funding model just isn't appropriate for game studios. I'll go even further and extend that to any content business. Why? Because games specifically and content in general don't scale with how much money you have or spend. We've seen countless examples of this.
Remember Angry Birds? Rovio took VC funding. How did that work out?
Netflix arguably may have run itself into insolvency by overspending on original content to the point where it enters a death spiral of losing subscribers and raising subscription prices to compensate.
Just because you create 1 successful game or TV show or movie doesn't mean that if someone hands you a large check you can't create 10 more just as successful. It doesn't even mean your organically successful original content will remain successful.
Of course there are successful franchies in gaming (eg Call of Duty, Halo, Assassin's Creed). These may end up being worth something and do have an inbuilt audience so they scale better ut they still take significant work.
How do you think Hollywood works, if not by taking a group of actors and directors and producers that previously made a successful film and giving them a bunch of money to do it again?
Content absolutely does scale with budget--you can make 10,000 films that cost $10,000 to produce but they will never match the box office of a film that you spent $100M on. This should be obvious: you can't even afford to pay an actor with $10,000.
Completely agree. I think the prevalence of sequels in Hollywood underscores the point; successful content begets popular content at a higher rate than a complete unknown.
"Sequels" are the opposite of "just spend ten times as much money to make ten times more" - in that exponential-growth VC-model type strategy, you'd need to be spawning new franchises in parallel so you could have sequels to ALL of them at the same time, not just wait one by one. Sequels are "do the same thing again" not "be able to do more of them at once."
For every MCU there's a Fantastic Four standalone or a Universal Monsters Universe or a Percy Jackson or a Golden Compass or Narnia or other never-to-be-finished would-be franchises... or even just a Star Wars: Solo on the "hmm this isn't paying off after all actually even if it's not a bomb" front. And those were all existing IP, even!
When's the last time Hollywood film studios 10x'd their revenue? Even looking at global box office, it increased from 23.1B in 2005 to 42.3B in 2019 pre-Covid.
That's not a growth rate that would attract a VC. Not a lot of new VC-founded studios, as a result. Would you count Quibi?
Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon, cable networks, and movies are all competing for a finite set of attention, and there are more other things competing for that attention than ever before too. Netflix has aggressively expanded to compete globally in a way US cable never did, but that still has a ceiling.
If you ten-x'd the amount of 200-million-budget films made in a year you'd similarly hit a wall. At a certain point all you're doing is raising the bar necessary to attract consumer attention, vs attracting new attention and dollars.
> When's the last time Hollywood film studios 10x'd their revenue?
We actually don’t know. They veil the real numbers for each movie in complicated shell and subsidiary corporations and private arrangements that can’t be audited by the public.
Your claim now is that not just the internal PnL for films is obfuscated but both global box office numbers + public company reporting top-line revenue is as well?
If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio because of that, good luck to you, but... doesn't seem like you'll get a lot of bites.
> Your claim now is that not just the internal PnL for films is obfuscated but both global box office numbers + public company reporting top-line revenue is as well?
Where did I make a claim about the top line numbers?
> If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio
Wut? At this point I’m not sure you’re actually responding to my comment but cheers
It’s not VC money but you pretty much described Amazon, Netflix, and so on. If they are dumping money hand over fist into original content they probably have a good economic argument for it.
..? Hollywood film studios don't 10x their revenue the same way VCs don't 10x their revenue. VCs bet on companies that 10x their investment, and studios bet on movies that 10x their investment. The wins are so big that they enable risk taking on bets that might be flops. It's no different in book publishing or the music industry.
I don't think the holds. When Sony bought Columbia there's an apocryphal story of the USA executives explaining the business to the new Japanese owners and saying "We make 20 movies and only 1 is profitable". The Japanese executives talked to each other in Japanese and then replied "Please only make the 1 profitable movie". In other words, the mis-understood that the USA executives were trying to tell them they don't know which of the 20 movies is going to be a hit.
Going back to 2019 (so taking COVID out of the consideration), "Dark Phoenix" tanked, cost $200 million. "Gemini Man" tanked, cost $172 million. Plenty of 30-70 million dollar movies that didn't do well.
This page list 680 movies that came out, no list of budget but only around 1/6th made 10 million and I'm sure there's a long list of the ~500 that made less than 10 million that cost more than 10 million to make.
I kinda love the “it’s definitely wrong or taken out of context, but once I’ll have finished telling the story we’ll have forgotten about that caveat” vibe that comes with this disclaimer.
Sony is no stranger to throwing spaghetti at the whole to see which stick, I mean they have are a movie studio in Japan too, and no they’re not throwing homeruns after homeruns all year long.
Hollywood has a near infinite supply of original writers and source material to take from and adapt to film.
It could be argued that it’s less about creating content than transforming content (craft mastery and artistry is still required, but the concept is pretty different).
That’s also where I think Netflix isn’t that much in trouble based only on its business model.
But it doesn’t work with game creation. You can’t just transform source material (original or not), it needs completely different innovative elements.
To note, game franchises also exist, but while they are wildly profitable I’d see that as a well guarded niche.
I meant that Hollywood has many many original scenario writers that will come up with original ideas, but if they were to magically all disappear tomorrow:
- it could still take any best seller book from the past 5 centuries and make it a script
- it could take any ancient story / non controversial religion gods / legend and turn into a script
- it could autogenerate stories from an AI until something that makes sense comes out and adapt that into a movie
I really think the input part is a solved problem, as long as there is enough talent to make it into a decent movie, and this part is move forgiving of "deja vu" and repeating the same techniques (nobody's gonna throw a fit because the director reused a shooting angle from a previous movie, at most it will be a meh moment)
Here's a good example of the problem. Marvel vs DC.
Both of these companies have significant (ie decades) of original material to draw upon. For the last 20 years, superhero movies have absolutely dominated the theaters.
But no one would look at this situation and draw any conclusion other than Marvel has trounced DC. Is the Marvel source material just that much better? IMHO it isn't to a significant enough degree.
What is different is execution. Marvel IP has just been better managed and they've had and built a better organization around it. It's drawn on Disney's extensive pedigree in this business.
Producing original content is difficult. It requires a culture of putting up with the 10 flops for that 1 breakout hit. There is no formula for that 1 breakout hit. A million factors go into why that hit became a hit and it's not a formula that can be copied and reproduced as the VC funding model demands.
And Marvel went bankrupt in the 1990s, which to your point, is all about IP management. Disney I would argue has absolutely done VC-enviable returns on its Marvel acquisition.
It spent $4 billion on the company in 2009. They’ve easily made $100b off of the films, TV shows, comics, merchandise, theme park rides, etc.
I wholly agree with your point re: content that it has the culture of 10 flops for every hit. But that studio model, which has always existed in Hollywood, is the same model and a VC fund. Instead of going public, you get sequels or branch into other IP.
Are the returns the same? Generally no. But a good acquisition, like Marvel and Star Wars for Disney and Harry Potter (and to a lesser but historically significant degree, DC Comics) for Warner Bros, can pay dividends the exact same way as investing in a future tech titan.
This excludes future obligations. Netflix is obligated by both customers and contracts to produce more content in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Netflix has 180 million more subscribers that Paramount Plus, which probably means 10 times the cash flow, which means it can produce more content, which means it can attract more subscribers.
Rarely does a show get killed halfway through a season unlike network tv where your favourite pilot only lasts 4 weeks.
The problem is rarely does a show last more than a few seasons and that is mostly because of how contracts are written where you pay low for an unknown actors for 2/3 seasons and when those contracts are up for renewal you move on.
On network tv after 4 seasons it can be sold for syndication so many shows get cancelled. For netflix the money spent on new seasons keeps existing customers but does nothing to attract new ones. This forces netflix to create new shows that hopefully attract new subs.
Paramount has done just fine for the last century. If you mean as a streaming platform, they only recently started even trying...and thanks to Star Trek, they've had a pretty decent start.
This is true, but it fails to take into account back catalog the legacy media companies such as Paramount, Disney, NBC Comcast, and to some extent even HBO have to fall back on. They gain subscribers simply to watch the content they made 20+ years ago, and then on top of that, have in many cases just been running sequel and spinoff series on things they already know work. Sure, not every spinoff series works, but it's sort of like they're throwing darts at a known dartboard in a well lit room; Netflix is throwing darts in the general vicinity of where it believes a dartboard to be based on the sounds its heard from getting lucky in the past in a pitch black room. The consequence is that Netflix pays a lot more money finding its hits than its competitors do.
This isn't insurmountable, and Netflix has shown itself to be full of innovative means of handling this reality. But while the bulk of the last 10 years was just gathering subscribers to pay for other peoples' content (remember, until recently, The Office, Friends, Star Trek, and Disney movies were ALL on Netflix), the next 10 will require them to do more in the way of finding original content that works, and acquiring things from smaller/foreign studios (a la Squid Game). They've got practice, but they've lost their money printer.
I feel it goes without saying that big budgets = more (and better odds) opportunities for big success because you can afford to take more cracks at it.
More money in is more rolls of the dice though which is important. It’s also leverage to build/buy brands around successes which is basically the play all the big content publishers have made lately.
Technically, to check for insolvency, you need to look at the balance sheet, not the profit & loss statement. But that sounds like some extremely handsome profits.
The story that I saw is that they have a lot of loans kicking in the next couple of years that will totally wipe out their profit margins.
Looking at [0] it looks like it's.... manageable but you still need the money. If you're making 1.5 billion in profit and the next year you have 2 billion in debt to payoff...
I meant more that if this is the consistent case, then in practice you’re going to have problems in the midterm.
I understand that cash flow issues can be resolved with corporate debt, but it requires convinced counter parties and, honestly, future revenue to bargain with. “Our subscriber count isn’t really going up and we need to borrow more money consistently every year” is not the same as “we are immensely profitable” (though I don’t think it’s a doomsday scenario in itself)
They're pivoting to including an ad-supported tier. Microsoft is on board for providing the ad-platform. I wouldn't worry about Netflix going away within the next few years. Whether it tops the markets like it did the past 10 years is another story, but I wouldn't worry about insolvency.
VC firms, game studios, and movie studios all operate using the same “blockbuster business model,” meaning they expect the profits from one of every ten deals to pay for the losses of the other nine.
Maybe the lesson is that multiple blockbuster models interfere with each other when combined into one venture? It seems kind of like how you can’t make an infinite chain of hypervisors.
With VC funding, though, once they find that one blockbuster business, they expect it to be able to grow exponentially because it has a defensible, unique "special sauce" that is scalable.
With games, though, one successful game or franchise rarely guarantees additional successful games or franchises. In some ways it's "catching lightning in a bottle", and very difficult to repeat, even if you have the same inputs (designers, programmers, funding).
The problem is that they almost never actually have the same designers, programmers, artists, writers, or funding or anything.
From what I've heard, the game industry is notorious for laying a lot of the staff off after a game project before they even know if the game is successful or not. Then they might bring those people back for a sequel if they are still available when they start making it.
One of the things that killed my interest in working in the industry is the working conditions, and the expectation that many employees are actually one person company contracting for the next gig.
So on top of all the known issues, one can be let go at any time.
Disney has organically grown over the better part of a century. VC funding is predicated on way higher growth rates.
Look at any movie studio, Disney, HBO, etc and you'll find this same story repeated time and time again. Every one of them grew at much slower growth rates. There was no 10x'ing of revenue in a few years (when in the billions).
Even outliers like Pixar existed for 20 years before becoming a significcant component of Disney.
Book publishing? Same deal.
No original content business has followed a VC growth trajectory like tech companies have. Not one. You might be tempted to argue Netflix has but Netflix has taken on a ton of debt and raised a ton of VC funding and used their profits to throw money at this problem with mixed results.
But you're just mapping the funders/producers/etc in a way that happens to support your narrative. Disney and HBO aren't startups or even young companies and lots of things in the 'content business' are funded and developed in ways that's quite similar to the way VC funding works.
It's a relevant mapping for a comparison to Niantic. It's not just a convenient one. "Turn Niantic into Disney (or even EA, if you prefer) in the span of 10 years" is a bad bet for a VC. The argument here is that you can't simply scale the effort to the next hit(s).
"Turn this handful of people into the next Niantic" is a far better bet, but it's not relevant since Niantic was already there! That's the similarity to Hollywood - "let's make a bunch of movies or a bunch of pilots and see which one is the moneymaker." But not many of the production companies behind those shows or movies have gotten 10x more profitable in the future by scaling horizontally.
The argument is more general than that, though, from the topcomment - "The VC funding model just isn't appropriate for game studios. I'll go even further and extend that to any content business."
That seems obviously not right? If anything, the model in 'content' predates the technology VC business.
Niantic is too afraid to move fast and break things, as a famous robot once put it. They started with an interactive game that included location based chat and ultimately even made way for the ability to track players actions on an intel map. They then immediately became afraid of the implications of their own creation and have spent the last 10 years backtracking. Pokemon Go never had a chat. They imposed all manner of restrictions to try to stop people from playing while driving, and, in doing so, also basically hobbled players who use bicycles (because of speed constraints). Harry Potter...well, they handed far too much control to WB, who didn't know the first thing about this sort of game design, and got left with a mess nobody wanted to play. And then there's Pikmin, which I frankly was excited for when I heard it announced, as the console games were a pretty neat concept that I didn't think got nearly the attention they deserved. There's almost no game whatsoever. Next to ZERO interaction with other players (fine...you can see flowers they plant). It's a glorified pedometer app.
I'm not sure if it's an overly cautious legal team they're dealing with or what, but someone should remind John Hanke that start ups don't break through by playing it safe. And to boot, casual players aren't the ones that dump money into games. Maybe they need to add age verification in to satisfy the lawyers before making a game that's actually fun to play, but this backing away from doing what they're in the business of doing is sad to watch and frankly pretty pathetic.
A quick Google search indicates that $4B has been invested by VCs in video game companies since ~2010 [1]. The fact that these businesses are "hits based" actually aligns very closely with the power-law nature of VC returns. In fact, Electronic Arts was backed by Sequoia in the 1980s & does $7B in annual revenue today. Lots of other "successes" (defined by achieved liquidity for early VC investors) include Zynga, Tencent, Roblox, etc.
Most content isn’t funded through a VC model though but a more traditional publishing one where you get advanced the money to make the content with a contract that lets the publisher recoup first and then take a percentage of revenue.
Netflix is a publisher in this context but only sells through its own channels so is more analogous to console manufacturers in games. Their problem is basically having a low barrier for competitors to enter and they all own more compelling first-party content.
Most VC funded companies are doing more than producing content or are opening markets. Which isn’t to say the games investment hype cycle hasn’t been very silly lately but it’s more often a bet on technology and/or a potentially emerging market.
Pokemon Go was hugely popular, but basically making the same game with less popular brands/new IPs on top of them was never going to work. And that seems like all their other projects were.
Phones still aren't really able to provide a proper immersive AR experience, there's only so much you can do with gamified Google maps.
The funny thing is I still think of them as the Ingress company. Pokemon Go was just Ingress with a popular brand slapped on it, and that was enough to put it in the headlines again... once.
pogo did a good job at killing ingress. Then niantic was like oops we forgot about you because you are the bastard child pokemon go is the gifted child. Lets rewrite the client from scratch but completely butcher it from both a UI and UX. Haven't touched it since they forced everyone to the prime client. I was heavily involved in both the local and national scene.
They also made the larger events (anomalies) paid entry, it was free before.
I haven't played Ingress since it was owned by Google. When I stopped allowing Location Services on my phone, Ingress went away with it, unsurprisingly. I did make a lot of friends back then, some of whom I still talk to today.
It was definitely an interesting way to put you on an IRL collision course with other people of similar tech interests.
Wouldn't be surprised if they butchered it by using react native honestly. They're a skilled team but a lot of the problems I've heard of sound like hybrid dev. issues.
Agreed, I actually have never heard of Pokémon Go until late last year, imagine my surprise when I learnt that it's not only hugely popular, but even those who don't usually play games it as well!
I disagree. I think the hololens showed that AR can be equally as compelling as VR. Seeing stuff in the real world is really cool, and I imagine multiplayer stuff (like laser tag) could be cool.
The main issue with it was the hilariously small field of view. If they solve that I can imagine it being as popular as VR.
This company has never been able to move on from being the Pokemon Go company, and they never will. I applaud them for their AR vision but unfortunately for all of us they got lucky with PGo and can’t replicate. And a string of hits is prerequisite to being able to pull of an AR platform like they dream of.
Honestly it’s not even an AR game (unless you count GPS location based gaming as AR). Anyone who plays PoGo turns off the AR mode after about 5 minutes and only turns it on for taking pictures of their Pokémon running around the park/house/pool/etc.
Despite what Niantic thinks, they don’t really have much of an AR vision besides reskinning Ingress/Pokémon Go. They aren’t an AR company, they are a “makes money with a license for the insanely popular Pokemon franchise” company.
Microsoft did it pretty well with Minecraft Earth, from a UX point of view anyway. From a "managing finite system resources" point of view, it was a spectacular failure, which is why the game failed. Even the top notch hardware was turned into a fast-dying hand warmer by that game.
It was a clever gimmick but didn't really enhance the gameplay much beyond novelty. I think the fact that it's been 6 years and no one has topped it or even replicated it says that AR is just not happening. At least not on a phone.
In fairness, when they started Ingress, Google Glass was in Beta testing. We all KNEW it was just around the corner. The videos of being able to SEE the portals in the real world had us drooling. And then...it never happened.
Microsoft used AR fantastically in Minecraft Earth, I might add. The thing that killed this attempt was the fact that the game didn't run well on any currently existing hardware (I had a Pixel 5 and could watch the battery drain in real time...nevermind feeling like I should be wearing gloves to combat the heat). When doing an adventure in ME, if skeletons were shooting at you, you dodged by ACTUALLY DODGING, which was definitely a novel experience (and made for looking like a total fool in the park...but hey, you're playing Minecraft in the park). It feels like at some point, this sort of thing is inevitable, but the hardware may be what is ultimately holding things back for now.
Niantic's attempts at visual AR haven't been nearly as interesting -- not sure if this is just knowing that the hardware wouldn't hold up, or not having the vision to implement it. They used to at least have the interest in immersive alternate reality gaming that tied in nicely, but that seems to be a long gone thing of the past.
I still like Pokemon Go, but being honest at this point I used it more like a Fitness app rather than a pure video game. After the initial boom, I think the game become a form of "sports social network" IRL, thanks to the Raids. Sadly after COVID, a lot of the friends I hang out playing, just stop it, and the game didn't innovate enough to be still fun to play in house to a large base.
So as much as I like the product, I find hard for Niantic to replicate the mainstream phenomena they had in 2016. I hope to be wrong, and they surprise with innovate like a AR wearable or a game with better mechanics. Sadly, I think those Layoffs are a reality check of the current state of their games.
The raids for me were just meeting a bunch of geeks who you may recognise from last time, but nothing more, and looking at your phone for 5 minutes. They really could have emphasised the social aspects a lot more, but I guess it's tricky when a lot of your customer base is kids...
I will admit to only playing Pokémon Go, and nothing else in their portfolio. And I finally gave up on Go about 6 months ago, after playing since 2016.
(Maybe they made some amazing updates since then, and my points here are totally invalid…)
But what an extremely mismanaged product. Extremely buggy, extremely slow development, and extremely over-hyped AR features. Niantic was very slow in fixing any issues with the core game loop, and they basically never fixed issues with the later features, namely Battle League. I don’t even know where to start with the issues…opaque errors, location problems, low frame-rates, awful connectivity for Bluetooth accessories, buggy “Adventure Sync”, poor communications with users about issues or UI problems…
I played forever because of my perpetual love for Pokémon, and because it helped me connect with neighbors. Not that Niantic helped in any way at all there—community building was totally ad-hoc, via Facebook groups, or Facebook group chats, or Discord, or WhatsApp. But the entire time, I knew I was playing in a rickety house that was going to fall down at any moment. And it’s just not a surprise that house is starting to fall down.
(I just sort of drifted away, when my new dog demanded much more attention than my old fella. Turns out a year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever has a lot of energy, versus a 9-year-old Lab…)
Frankly I’d have turned it the location based aspect too if I could have. I don’t want to go places to play a video game, I just want to play it wherever I am. Obviously that wasn’t the point of the game, but it turned me off to the game after a few days. Never mind how repetitive it was.
Well then you could just play literally any other game. I'm very intrigued by the possibilities of a physical-location-based multiplayer game. I got into Ingress, but there wasn't significance to decisions in that game for my taste. I hope one day someone produces another GPS-based game that has more interesting strategy.
Ah, but you couldn’t play Pokémon on your mobile phone, (side-loading emulators on android nonwithstanding). I’d bet that was a sizable chunk of the appeal, especially since ingress did not have anywhere near the success.
It's not my kind of game either, but was definitely interesting and to me a good thing because it got people out of house.
I used to walk my local park daily for years, only ever saw a few people. Seemingly out of nowhere, the park seemed always packed...kids, adults, you name it. It was kind of jarring to me, to be honest.
I mentioned it in passing to my brother, kinda complaining about the sudden crowds but later describing it down to details...how people seemed to be taking pics of the ground for no reason...he said "they're playing pokemon go, dummy." I had no idea such a thing existed and thought I was going nuts.
But ultimately what I saw was a lot of people venturing out and about, enjoying the day, having fun solo or in groups... and thought it was a net positive to society, for once, unlike most modern apps and games.
COVID neutered quite a lot of that. Though in retrospect it was a bit silly to be that scared of being outside…let’s not go there…
But more so, Niantic’s responses really killed in-person gameplay. You had Remote Raids, where you could be invited to join a raid at a gym from a friend. A good idea, but one they never really weaned the player base off of, because it was way easier for players to stay on the couch. (Well, and Niantic made fat bundles of cash off the Remote Raid Passes IAP.)
They also made totally sensible changes to interaction distances—which is to say, they doubled (was it doubled…whatever, a non-trivial increase) the distance you could be away from a Pokéstop or a Gym to interact with it. A really nice change, and one that I think made the game better even outside the pandemic. And they rolled it back, right when Omicron took hold. And they barely spoke a word about any of the changes. It felt fickle. Arbitrary.
I think they panicked when the pandemic arrived and did not consider the long term ramifications of the changes. Without those changes many players would quit the game.
We had some design challenges (and many other types of challenges...) but we really tried with Minecraft: Earth to go big with AR AND location-based gaming.
After we sunset it, it really struck me how scary GaaS can be. No one can play Minecraft in AR any more (at least currently) and I think that, even if it got old fast, it was a pretty magical experience. It made me really want to record a video playthrough for a few hours to try and capture the experience.
And it applies to all games with a server component. It is arguably even worse with MMOs like world of warcraft that have significant patch circles, as it effectively get removed every 1-2 yrs.
Minecraft Earth's big failure was being just too bloated for most hardware to handle it. I was running a fairly current Pixel phone and in one of the AR modes (build or adventure) watching the battery drain was like time lapse photography...never mind how hot the phone would get in the process. Microsoft jumped the gun with software that the hardware wasn't ready for; I'd hope they try something similar in a few years when things have had a chance to catch up.
For anyone that played Ingress, Niantic's earlier game, then the poor handling of Pokemon Go development is exactly inline with expectations, though still disappointing.
ingress is a weird one, despite being several years older it still has longevity. There is still a dedicated core of players for it that follow the complex story, and I know a bunch of the players in my (small-ish) city, and have on several occasions occasion come across them in person. The big issue to my eyes is that they have a winning formula with the area control game, but they don't do much to shake it up (they do occasionally and every time it's awesome, like targets that travel between portals that players have to fight to funnel towards certain areas for their team)
I am a 38-year-old. I am perfectly capable of assessing what is of worth to me.
It got me out exploring my new neighborhood. I made casual friends which made me feel connected to the area. Got my dog lots and lots of walks, especially when the pandemic started. I have some truly fond memories of coming across rare Pokémon with said dog—who is now dead.
I had a great time. I was outside, in the world, walking and interacting, and it cost me some in-app purchase money. I spent, per month, significantly less than I would have going to one single movie. So don’t you dare to assume what is valuable or me to not.
It must be "in their DNA" or something. You could replace "Pokemon Go" with "Ingress", their earlier game, and get to almost exactly the same conclusions.
Also, with Ingress the most innovative area was also the one that players complained about the loudest - I am talking about actual player interactions. Going to someone else's portal and bombing it, creating blocker links, covering a strategic area with a huge field so as to win the cycle, etc. Unfortunately it got too competitive some players, so they started location spoofing, edit wars on portals and other behaviors that made the experience shitty for others.
Niantic's reaction was to gut that from their next games rather than try to improve. So I'm still waiting for a good location-based game where you can have some real location-based interactions with other players. Current offering is mostly "everybody going outside and playing a single-player game next to each other".
I think Introversion Software's "Subversion"[0] is an excellent case study for the kind of problem Niantic's games always had: all tech demo, no game.
Ingress was an incredibly exciting technical innovation at the time. The idea of playing an area control game using your real world GPS coordinates was novel and the game encouraged genuine discovery in its initial phase by allowing you to record local points of interest: even in your hometown the game might lead you to walk down a road you were unfamiliar with and discover an interesting monument, fountain or building.
But they never really considered where to take it from there. Once the novelty wore off, it was mostly grind. Advanced players quickly developed strategies to optimize their play and "casuals" quickly fell behind with no way to catch up. The game remained fun for a small core group but effectively lacked an on-ramp for new players. Pokemon Go repeated this problem. They had created new exciting systems but not figured out how to make the game sustainably "fun" for most players.
I can only recommend watching the entire Failure Masterclass series from Introversion Software but at least the final video addressing their most anticipated game that never was, Subversion (a spiritual successor to Uplink). Without spoiling too much, the game was becoming increasingly complex and interesting but ultimately failed because there was no "game" there that would survive contact with players.
High level play is not about levels, it's about having multiple hours per day to drive around, gather resources and create links. Access to portals in closed areas is a bonus.
A group of determined players can keep a town permanently covered by a field, preventing everybody else from playing, especially if the anchor portals are in military bases or gated communities.
There was this idiotic rule that a portal is considered reachable if more than one family can reach it. So gated communities were officially fair game.
Definitely "in theory". A friend and I reported several portals that were completely unreachable by the public, deep into private property, and/or clearly physically unsafe. "Nah, portal's fine" was always the response form Niantic, if we even got one at all.
Maybe you need to play the game of being friendly with the people who permafield you and convincing them not to. Or being friendly with people who can stop them
Not really high level play, just high don't-care-about-anyone-else play
Well, the emergent feature of PoGO pre-pandemic was meeting new people. It's kind of like smoking is not really about smoking, if you know what I mean.
So are all the optimizations, really. There's enough surface area in the game they do provide some depth and give new people incentive to network with the pros. Whenever Niantic introduces a new Pokemon, mechanic or bonus there's something new to learn in terms of the meta-game.
I started playing in 2016 before the official release, but hasn't done so since some time in the pandemic - remote raids took out the fun out of it for me.
Spot on. Ingress was fun when there was engagement, and it largely came down to whether or not your local community was particularly lame. However, that it was even able to succeed as well as it did had largely to do with not being particularly popular, in particular among the minor population. They'd almost need a 21+ age verifier to avoid the disaster that'd come with a game of that nature that actually grew to large scale. I'd love to see Shadowrun as an AR GPS game, but it absolutely is in this boat.
Pokemon Go is so much wasted potential. Could have been an amazing game with more content. Just look at existing pokemon go games and try to add such content (random NPCs around the world, random/semi random quests, more building/store types etc. Maybe even seasonal events like fighting gyms and collecting badges) and it would be an amazing game. Hire me niantic.
My guess is pokemon company intentionally butchers it and makes it distinct than (or lite version of) regular pokemon games.
I played Pokemon Go daily throughout the pandemic as a way to get out of the house and get some exercise. I also quit a few months ago as the walking habit has stuck without the need for any other incentive.
it's glyphs from Ingress, niantics first game, imo lesser-known but far superior. it's coming up on it's 10th aniversary and imo still going relatively strong with a dedicated playerbase.
They should have taken some of that Pokémon Go venture capital to rent out some real life locations that could be Pokémon themed and used as places where players could gather for monetizable events somehow. Exclusive content and community building.
Imagine that a company who created a game that was clearly a massive fad that stopped growing years ago, was unable to sustain that unrealistic growth.
It’s almost like it’s important to make business decisions off long term expectations, not short term miracles.
But then again, these are educated businesspeople who would know better than me…right? :P
My connection with this is just that I was in Google Maps, and I knew some of the people who worked on Ingress. At the time, a "location-based game" seemed like a brilliant idea. I guess the novelty wore off.
The Angry Birds analogy is spot on. A game is just a fad, unless you manage to turn it into a franchise. The best financial model, if you have a successful fad, is "take the money and run." You just won the lottery, which tells us nothing about your innate ability to win lotteries.
The novelty of location based games never wore off for me, but the gameplay created by Niantic lost it's charm very quickly.
I hope Naiantic's failure will not doom location based gaming. I suffered through the meaningless grind of Pokemon GO for longer than I expected because I loved the human and exploring elements so much. Niantic stumbled on a brilliant idea and completely failed to make an engaging game. It is hard for me to exaggerate how good I think locations based games are and how bad Niantic is at making games.
There are so many possibilities in this space. I encourage any game maker interested to continue developing it. Maybe something that tells a story or solve a puzzle rather than just collect crap.
I think the biggest issue for location based apps is that no one except niantic have access to Google’s map data.
If that data was easily available, I imagine you’d see a lot of great location apps. It’s not hard to imagine the normal Pokémon games in the location setting, where you actually move around instead of moving an avatar around and “fight” Pokémon in different areas to “win” them, or go to “gyms” and battle with friends and what not.
You’d probably need to design the stranger meeting stranger part around having that sort of thing only happen in secure locations like in the DND/Warhammer shop, and everything on non secure locations be based on friend systems, but still, it’s not hard to imagine a good location based Pokémon game. It’s just that niantic won’t make it.
Maybe open street map can supply the data, but you’re never going to have access to Google’s real world live monitoring of the movement of everyone with a smartphone.
I think Niantic is struggling because they go the franchise route. They have few new ideas for their games, it's just mostly a new skin. But i haven't really tried the Harry Potter game and Pikmin Bloom so maybe i am wrong.
The Harry Potter game was a little bit more complicated, I think PoGo was probably the simplest, at least at launch, I'm not sure what its like now, and other than being a super well-known IP is partially why it was successful IMO. I guess you could probably point to that also being one reason why the HP game wasn't as successful despite also being a popular IP. I haven't tried Pikmin Bloom.
Remembering my Ingress days. It was the best. Was able to travel and meet a lot of people. Great community. They were not able to keep my interest. I was a key player in South India.
I picked it back up the other day ultimately thanks to this thread and remembering how much better things were in their early days, and am giving it another go, as I ultimately put it down giving their later offerings a shot. They've added in Adventure Sync, which, in conjunction with Quantum Capsules, is something I've been after for awhile, particularly now that I no longer live in a city (it lets you dupe items you already have based on walking distances...very handy if you're not in an area where there are people to easily come together to make P8 farms). Even with fewer players around I instantly got sucked into some adversarial shenanigans with another player or two in town, which was always the fun of the game in the first place.
I was shocked and appalled when they killed Field Trip, honestly. It's the forgotten Niantic app, but was a big part of what built that map and POI database in the first place, and was something I at least occasionally fired up when in a new area with some time to kill (waiting for hotel check ins). Monetizing it could have been tough given that so many of the POI's are just things like plaques and statues, but a slight tweaking of criteria could have EASILY given them some ability to have sponsored content. I suspect it was just a matter of diverting resources to other projects. Frankly I'd say it was still at least their third best project yet.
It still pains me to think what a disappointment and missed opportunity Pokemon Go was imho. I don't get it why they ditched the signature Pokemon fighting system for something pretty arbitrary, and so many other strange decisions that only make sense if you know that they also built Ingress and probably approached Pokemon Go as another iteration of that instead of building on the - extremely well established - Pokemon games.
It was a disappointment for you maybe. It was a huge success and appealed to people outside the typical video game audience. You don’t get that by rehashing a 25 year old Game Boy game again.
I don't deny that Pokemon Go was a huge success and that it has a lot of players who love it for what it is. I just wish somebody was still going to build an actual location-based Pokemon game.
> I just wish somebody was still going to build an actual location-based Pokemon game.
Pokemon Go is absolutely a "location-based Pokemon game" today. The mechanics are simplified from the mainline console games, but it's definitely location-based Pokemon.
The core mechanics of Pokemon are arguably the battles and catch'em'all. Pokemon Go is only a Pokemon game if you don't consider battles a core mechanic. The battle system in Pokemon Go had nothing to do with the Pokemon battle system, and not much strategy or tactics to it at all.
There was no need to simplify the battles, they were already as simple as it gets: select a Pokemon, select an attack, watch the result. Easy to learn, some tactical depth, works on mobile, accessible for all ages -> no need for changes. I'd say that the Pokemon Go battles were actually no simpler, they just lacked any depth and were less accessible.
Exactly. Yes, it's a successful game by traditional standards, but the initial hype was the biggest in gaming ever, by a wide margin. I'd argue that it would not have been that hard to convert a much higher percentage of those initial players with a few simple features like a decent battle and levelling system (simply use the template they used for every other Pokemon game) and optional PvP action (just challenge someone in your vicinity). I'm pretty sure people would have opened cafes just to facilitate Pokemon Go PvP battles.
I also felt that it was very boring and not living up to the hype at all, as the "gameplay" was basically to walk around and tap your screen sometimes to collect something or make a gesture on your screen to catch random useless Pokémon xyz by making a gesture instead. Besides the lackluster gameplay I also didn't see any meaningful progression system, so it lost my interest very quickly. The AR features were very gimmicky.
It could have been so much more. However I may not be in the target audience and some people did seem to enjoy the casual style - or play a lot despite that.
It was also obvious from the second you started playing that you were expected to shell out lots of money to get any semblance of the "designed experience".
Also for some reason there were no poke stops or anything of note within many miles of my home. I live in a city of 60k people. But niantic originally populated their map based on the important locations in ingress, so if that game wasn't popular where you lived you basically got locked out of gameplay.
Ingress was much better about giving you a real reason to pick out specific places. You didn't HAVE to do it, but building large fields to cover big territory was (and may well still be) a huge part of what made the game fun for a lot of people, as was building blocking links in order to stop others from doing the same thing. And all of that actually made use of the map effectively.
Pokemon Go, on the other hand...never really did. Sure, you've got the gyms, and biomes...the raids turned into this whole weird activity of piling into cars to drive from raid to raid...but generally, a raid in one place was as good as a raid in another. And dear god, while I thought Ingress had you staring at your phone a bit too much, at least if you were out doing those fielding trips, you had it in your pocket in between portals (which, depending on your area, could have been miles). Not generally so with Pokemon Go (though I'm sure rural players will disagree with me here).
> I don't get it why they ditched the signature Pokemon fighting system for something pretty arbitrary,
This is the biggest fumble and what cemented the death of the game to me. Here’s what I think should have happened:
* Used the regular fighting system (turn based fighting)
* Allow players to have 6 on-hand Pokémon with the ability to preset teams.
* Any Pokémon caught after all 6 slots are filled are stored in the PC.
* Utilize the nostalgia of the old Gameboy/DS System and allow players that are within a certain distance to start a battle.
* Allow the creation of local tournaments (no exp gained )
* Hold regional based Tournaments where the winner is named the champion of that region and is qualified to participate in a National tournament.
* Hold a Worldwide tournament crowning a Pokémon World Champion. Participants must be winners of their nation’s tournament. (World Cup but for Pokémon)
* After a quantifiable amount of World Champions are made have prestigious “Pokémon Master” Tournament where the winner is crowned a Pokémon Master. Participants must be winners and runner ups of the World championship. Pull out all the stops to make this a hyped event on the same standing as League of Legends/Valorant E-sports tournaments since your already suing an IP greater than it.
* Add Dual Battle’s with a friend
* Hold Safari Zones/Events that allow rare specific Pokémon to be captured with increase of shinies (should have made these rare)
* For non PVP-players add in a Pokémon Snap like competition where participants can submit Photos of their Pokémon or wild Pokémon.
No, they depended on Google Glass coming out with them -- which they were about to, back when Ingress was still in Beta. Glass flopped, and Niantic floundered, but got a new lease on life thanks to the April Fool's Joke that was Pokemon Go.
Covid pretty much killed any interest I had. I used to play PoGo with my LARP friends at our weekly game.... it's a lot less fun when everyone only goes anywhere by themselves.
Plus, the game itself is way too simple, and very much time-oriented, you have to be free at the right time to make the events..
I think Niantic type games would be better if they were closer to World of Warcraft in terms of game mechanics, more guild focused, more complex mechanics, etc.
It's probably held back a bit by the fact that they use real location data, and it's played by kids, and there are bad people who might do bad things with that if they aren't very careful, so they probably will always have to heavily limit some of the social features.
The bugginess is pretty extreme though. It's just Google maps plus a Nintendo DS era game, why is it so buggy, and why is it so intolerant of when you run out of high speed data?
I was about to make a WoW-related comment but because you brought it up I'm going to piggy back off yours.
Pokemon Go battles are just boring. PvP is a combination of reflexes and rock-paper-scissors. When WoW introduced pet battles it was a very obvious knockoff of Pokemon, but it was still actually pretty fun. PVE scenarios like the Celestial Tournament (their version of the Elite 4) could be really challenging and take a lot of planning, where you'd need to go out searching for the right combination of battle pets to win, or maybe just experiment with what you have to make it work. PvP was pretty balanced -- there were still combinations that were overpowered at times but in general what mattered more was the combinations of battle pets because of their diverse movements, where one might be for applying debuffs and another is for doing multi-attacks.
In Pokemon Go pvp is just "what's your counter pokemon to bastiodon / alteria / skarmory / azumarill / galarian skunfisk / etc" and then trying to fake out your opponent by baiting shields or being clever in how you swap pokemon. It's not the worst model but it bothers me how much more fun WoW Pet Battles are when Pokemon was the source material on how it should work.
I know nothing about Pokemon, being old. But Ingress is a 2d game rather than the 0d game of Pokemon Go. Geometry matters as you link locations together
Niantic has received a lot of (warranted IMO) criticism. That said, they did make some positive improvements during the Covid era:
They increased the interaction radius for Pokestops & Gyms. They actually reverted it (at the "end" of covid), faced a giant backlash, and un-reverted it (back to the increased radius). This is a rare occurrence of Niantic actually listening to the community.
They introduced remote raid passes. Remote raids are great in a pandemic since you can raid with friends from anywhere. I assume these generate a lot of income for Niantic since it's sold for 250 coins (now 300 coins) for 3 passes. What's baffling to me is how they are constantly discouraging users from doing remote raids.
Niantic is the most baffling company. I played the original ingress beta with my friends and it was actually pretty fun, it felt like you were playing a tech demo, but for a tech demo it was engrossing.
When they shut it down and announced they started developing a game based on the pokemon IP that was pretty exciting, but the final product they released was frankly embarassing. I know the "I could build a this in a weekend" trope is ridiculous, but from my memory it felt that after over a year of developing (and shutting down a successful game for that amount of time!) they released what was basically a reskin of Ingress with less engrossing gameplay.
But the bafflement continued after that. Despite the bareness of the game it still had great success, except they failed to monetize it in any significant way, by the time they implemented half decent monetization their player base had already dropped by a factor hundred or something.
Of course given the ludicrous amount of initial hype that meant there was still an insane amount of players and they still made crazy revenue. And judging from the stories of players who remained active their development pace never really picked up.
I'd love to read war stories from those layed off. What happened inside that company that made it have such a seemingly weak game development pace despite being born from one of the worlds premier engineering firms. Was all of it spent on marketing and licensing the IP? Or spent on frivolous decoration like the fancy AR experience that mostly fizzled out?
All things considered the game was still a great success, just baffling when imagining the things that could have been. In my mind they could have been bigger than Nintendo itself.
Thats true, I was one of them. Ingress was a great game, and it was also kind of useful when I was in some new city, I could look where the portals are, and in many cases those were the interesting places to visit. Anyway, I somehow couldnt get used to the new client, and over time stopped playing.
Another thing is, that after experiencing Ingress, I kind of stopped believing in the "augmented reality" concept. The reality was augmented in one sense, but I noticed that when I focused on playing, I didnt notice some other things in the environment. My brain just didn't have enough capacity to perceive all the reality as it would normally do and also those augmented objects. It was more like a replacing.
My partner works in cognitive psychology. Your experience matches exactly what scientific research also found ("attentional capacity"). Funny coincidence :)
Pokémon Go served a purpose, and it was not indeed to be neither a “game” nor excel in “AR”.
Niantic’s (an Alphabet company) founder John Hanke (Google Earth, Google Maps, Street View…) achieved with Pokémon Go the most relevant production proof of concept that besides creating predictive products based on the “behavioural surplus” they could in fact, and globally, increase the effectiveness by simply herding people into bars, McDonald’s restaurants, shops and transforming the predictions into an actual increase of outcome. Users where instrumented into a predictable outcome.
With this Niantic in my opinion serves a greater and historical purpose: to demonstrate that this behaviourist approach to generate predictable results and monetise it was possible at a global scale.
Having said that, none of their recent game ideas sound promising to me, except perhaps Harry Potter. I think to do as well as Pokémon you need to come up with a concept that is interesting (or flavorful) enough for folks to weave into their daily routine.
Even Harry Potter might be a bad fit as IMO it has a really weak magic system (mechanically speaking). I suspect more successful would be a world with an interesting hard magic system with complex mechanics, plus compelling flavor like Harry Potter is so good at.
Personally I think Cultist Simulator would be a good fit, since it has compelling recipe-progression and has great flavor that could be woven into the real world.
Maybe Stranger Things, with the AR being a window into the Upside Down?
I wonder if there is a way to weave Eve Online into an AR experience where people could contribute resources to corporations & participate in territorial struggles.
Interested to hear other folks’ ideas for compelling AR experiences.
To me it’s mostly the mismatch between the world the player can interact with via the phone and the world they’re actually embodied in. Particularly for location-based or social games. It’s like going to a murder mystery weekend but everyone playing the actual game on their phone in a hotel room. These games need to lift the play off the screen. More LARP less AR. At least until AR is actually in glasses, in a shared consistent virtual space and not totally naff. The screen is then there to act as our screens do now, a way to access and record information but about the game specifically.
Yes, that is a good point. Perhaps more interaction could be fostered by giving each player only part of the solution, so you MUST collaborate. Murder mystery is a good one because you could have different clues visible to different players. (Perhaps your class enables you to decode certain clue types.)
One mechanic I thought of for AR Cultist Simulator is to have a “be afraid to share” mechanic where you need to share with somebody in order to unlock recipes/solve challenges, but if you share widely you can be exploited. This could prevent folks from putting up FAQs revealing the solution to a given puzzle, and could provide a great tension and source of drama like Eve Online.
Anyway I think your idea for AR parlor games is a good one, that could be a very fruitful avenue. You could have a DM/host set up the clues within a house and let the rest play the game, or even have everyone scan the house and somehow randomly do the setup.
My experience with Ingress was great when it came out. It made me go out, socialize, meet new people. Stuff like teaming up to hack portals and build ridiculous big triangles that span cities or even continents sometimes needed coordination and was so rewarding when we pulled it off.
But it also felt they didn’t know what to do with Ingress. At some point the max level got hiked up to increase the grind and that was roughly when I stopped
Pokémon Go on the other hand felt much less complex and lost me personally as a player after a couple days
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206 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadI'm the opposite, how can they fail with a game that reportedly [0] took $1.21B in revenue last year (well past its zenith, as you point out) and by its nature it's fixed (doesn't need any development).
It seems like it's going to be 200:1 profits to expenditure with those numbers.
You've got to do things seriously badly to mess that up??
[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/
I'm pretty impressed.
I played it when it came out, and it was awesome. Many people where on the streets, best summer.
Then they blocked the apps that made finding Pokemons easy and all the people were gone in less than a week. I was baffled how they managed to destroy a global phenomenon in such a short amount of time.
But, yes, I remember, a few years ago, I met a buch of people who still played it, but they seemed to be Pokemon fans and not members of the public. So, it essentially became a regular Pokemon game played by the usual suspects, I guess.
Which isn't bad, I mean, Pokemon is basically the MCU of games. But compared to the summer it came out...
I thought it was a fad years ago tgat had gone extinct.
I guess current players are now so ashamed they avoid talking about it or making it too obvious.
Remember Angry Birds? Rovio took VC funding. How did that work out?
Netflix arguably may have run itself into insolvency by overspending on original content to the point where it enters a death spiral of losing subscribers and raising subscription prices to compensate.
Just because you create 1 successful game or TV show or movie doesn't mean that if someone hands you a large check you can't create 10 more just as successful. It doesn't even mean your organically successful original content will remain successful.
Of course there are successful franchies in gaming (eg Call of Duty, Halo, Assassin's Creed). These may end up being worth something and do have an inbuilt audience so they scale better ut they still take significant work.
Content absolutely does scale with budget--you can make 10,000 films that cost $10,000 to produce but they will never match the box office of a film that you spent $100M on. This should be obvious: you can't even afford to pay an actor with $10,000.
For every MCU there's a Fantastic Four standalone or a Universal Monsters Universe or a Percy Jackson or a Golden Compass or Narnia or other never-to-be-finished would-be franchises... or even just a Star Wars: Solo on the "hmm this isn't paying off after all actually even if it's not a bomb" front. And those were all existing IP, even!
That's not a growth rate that would attract a VC. Not a lot of new VC-founded studios, as a result. Would you count Quibi?
Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon, cable networks, and movies are all competing for a finite set of attention, and there are more other things competing for that attention than ever before too. Netflix has aggressively expanded to compete globally in a way US cable never did, but that still has a ceiling.
If you ten-x'd the amount of 200-million-budget films made in a year you'd similarly hit a wall. At a certain point all you're doing is raising the bar necessary to attract consumer attention, vs attracting new attention and dollars.
We actually don’t know. They veil the real numbers for each movie in complicated shell and subsidiary corporations and private arrangements that can’t be audited by the public.
If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio because of that, good luck to you, but... doesn't seem like you'll get a lot of bites.
Where did I make a claim about the top line numbers?
> If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio
Wut? At this point I’m not sure you’re actually responding to my comment but cheers
The claim I made was about "their revenue" - that's the top-line number. You disputed that by saying we don't know.
Going back to 2019 (so taking COVID out of the consideration), "Dark Phoenix" tanked, cost $200 million. "Gemini Man" tanked, cost $172 million. Plenty of 30-70 million dollar movies that didn't do well.
This page list 680 movies that came out, no list of budget but only around 1/6th made 10 million and I'm sure there's a long list of the ~500 that made less than 10 million that cost more than 10 million to make.
https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2019/top-grossing-movies
I kinda love the “it’s definitely wrong or taken out of context, but once I’ll have finished telling the story we’ll have forgotten about that caveat” vibe that comes with this disclaimer.
Sony is no stranger to throwing spaghetti at the whole to see which stick, I mean they have are a movie studio in Japan too, and no they’re not throwing homeruns after homeruns all year long.
Also that’s a pretty good joke reply I think.
It could be argued that it’s less about creating content than transforming content (craft mastery and artistry is still required, but the concept is pretty different).
That’s also where I think Netflix isn’t that much in trouble based only on its business model.
But it doesn’t work with game creation. You can’t just transform source material (original or not), it needs completely different innovative elements.
To note, game franchises also exist, but while they are wildly profitable I’d see that as a well guarded niche.
- it could still take any best seller book from the past 5 centuries and make it a script
- it could take any ancient story / non controversial religion gods / legend and turn into a script
- it could autogenerate stories from an AI until something that makes sense comes out and adapt that into a movie
I really think the input part is a solved problem, as long as there is enough talent to make it into a decent movie, and this part is move forgiving of "deja vu" and repeating the same techniques (nobody's gonna throw a fit because the director reused a shooting angle from a previous movie, at most it will be a meh moment)
Wrong, unless you measure "content" by "minutes of screen time."
If you measure it by box office, then we can easily prove you wrong. Many of the other commenters have already done that.
Both of these companies have significant (ie decades) of original material to draw upon. For the last 20 years, superhero movies have absolutely dominated the theaters.
But no one would look at this situation and draw any conclusion other than Marvel has trounced DC. Is the Marvel source material just that much better? IMHO it isn't to a significant enough degree.
What is different is execution. Marvel IP has just been better managed and they've had and built a better organization around it. It's drawn on Disney's extensive pedigree in this business.
Producing original content is difficult. It requires a culture of putting up with the 10 flops for that 1 breakout hit. There is no formula for that 1 breakout hit. A million factors go into why that hit became a hit and it's not a formula that can be copied and reproduced as the VC funding model demands.
It spent $4 billion on the company in 2009. They’ve easily made $100b off of the films, TV shows, comics, merchandise, theme park rides, etc.
I wholly agree with your point re: content that it has the culture of 10 flops for every hit. But that studio model, which has always existed in Hollywood, is the same model and a VC fund. Instead of going public, you get sequels or branch into other IP.
Are the returns the same? Generally no. But a good acquisition, like Marvel and Star Wars for Disney and Harry Potter (and to a lesser but historically significant degree, DC Comics) for Warner Bros, can pay dividends the exact same way as investing in a future tech titan.
Neither the balance sheet nor the income statement or cash flow statement supports your statement.
How different is Netflix from paramount plus?
As OP said: the content business is not normal. You can't assume that big budgets == big success.
Make 29 original shows, feel great if one becomes mainstream popular.
The problem is rarely does a show last more than a few seasons and that is mostly because of how contracts are written where you pay low for an unknown actors for 2/3 seasons and when those contracts are up for renewal you move on.
On network tv after 4 seasons it can be sold for syndication so many shows get cancelled. For netflix the money spent on new seasons keeps existing customers but does nothing to attract new ones. This forces netflix to create new shows that hopefully attract new subs.
It’s not as simple as throwing poop at the wall and hoping a bit of it sticks.
This isn't insurmountable, and Netflix has shown itself to be full of innovative means of handling this reality. But while the bulk of the last 10 years was just gathering subscribers to pay for other peoples' content (remember, until recently, The Office, Friends, Star Trek, and Disney movies were ALL on Netflix), the next 10 will require them to do more in the way of finding original content that works, and acquiring things from smaller/foreign studios (a la Squid Game). They've got practice, but they've lost their money printer.
Looking at [0] it looks like it's.... manageable but you still need the money. If you're making 1.5 billion in profit and the next year you have 2 billion in debt to payoff...
[0]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/04/21/netflixs-mountain-...
related reading from when things felt more rosey in 2019:
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/cf0f0bd6-4596-11e9-a965-23d669740...
You refinance...of course. Debt is always cycled like this. Yes, interest rates are higher than before but they are still incredibly low.
I understand that cash flow issues can be resolved with corporate debt, but it requires convinced counter parties and, honestly, future revenue to bargain with. “Our subscriber count isn’t really going up and we need to borrow more money consistently every year” is not the same as “we are immensely profitable” (though I don’t think it’s a doomsday scenario in itself)
Maybe the lesson is that multiple blockbuster models interfere with each other when combined into one venture? It seems kind of like how you can’t make an infinite chain of hypervisors.
With games, though, one successful game or franchise rarely guarantees additional successful games or franchises. In some ways it's "catching lightning in a bottle", and very difficult to repeat, even if you have the same inputs (designers, programmers, funding).
From what I've heard, the game industry is notorious for laying a lot of the staff off after a game project before they even know if the game is successful or not. Then they might bring those people back for a sequel if they are still available when they start making it.
So on top of all the known issues, one can be let go at any time.
I think in our oncoming age of batteries that this expression could have new meaning.
A great game or movie can make a ton of money. But a great tech company can make 2-3 orders of magnitude more.
Look at any movie studio, Disney, HBO, etc and you'll find this same story repeated time and time again. Every one of them grew at much slower growth rates. There was no 10x'ing of revenue in a few years (when in the billions).
Even outliers like Pixar existed for 20 years before becoming a significcant component of Disney.
Book publishing? Same deal.
No original content business has followed a VC growth trajectory like tech companies have. Not one. You might be tempted to argue Netflix has but Netflix has taken on a ton of debt and raised a ton of VC funding and used their profits to throw money at this problem with mixed results.
"Turn this handful of people into the next Niantic" is a far better bet, but it's not relevant since Niantic was already there! That's the similarity to Hollywood - "let's make a bunch of movies or a bunch of pilots and see which one is the moneymaker." But not many of the production companies behind those shows or movies have gotten 10x more profitable in the future by scaling horizontally.
That seems obviously not right? If anything, the model in 'content' predates the technology VC business.
I'm not sure if it's an overly cautious legal team they're dealing with or what, but someone should remind John Hanke that start ups don't break through by playing it safe. And to boot, casual players aren't the ones that dump money into games. Maybe they need to add age verification in to satisfy the lawyers before making a game that's actually fun to play, but this backing away from doing what they're in the business of doing is sad to watch and frankly pretty pathetic.
https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/video-games-companies-early-s...
They have branded toys and merch everywhere in the universe and even had a movie.
Whether they’re making money, I have no idea, but from a naive point of view they seem to have been pretty successful.
Netflix is a publisher in this context but only sells through its own channels so is more analogous to console manufacturers in games. Their problem is basically having a low barrier for competitors to enter and they all own more compelling first-party content.
Most VC funded companies are doing more than producing content or are opening markets. Which isn’t to say the games investment hype cycle hasn’t been very silly lately but it’s more often a bet on technology and/or a potentially emerging market.
Phones still aren't really able to provide a proper immersive AR experience, there's only so much you can do with gamified Google maps.
They also made the larger events (anomalies) paid entry, it was free before.
It was definitely an interesting way to put you on an IRL collision course with other people of similar tech interests.
The main issue with it was the hilariously small field of view. If they solve that I can imagine it being as popular as VR.
Despite what Niantic thinks, they don’t really have much of an AR vision besides reskinning Ingress/Pokémon Go. They aren’t an AR company, they are a “makes money with a license for the insanely popular Pokemon franchise” company.
If Apple manage to ship their glasses the AR stuff will actually make sense, until then AR features on phones are just a prototyping tool.
Microsoft used AR fantastically in Minecraft Earth, I might add. The thing that killed this attempt was the fact that the game didn't run well on any currently existing hardware (I had a Pixel 5 and could watch the battery drain in real time...nevermind feeling like I should be wearing gloves to combat the heat). When doing an adventure in ME, if skeletons were shooting at you, you dodged by ACTUALLY DODGING, which was definitely a novel experience (and made for looking like a total fool in the park...but hey, you're playing Minecraft in the park). It feels like at some point, this sort of thing is inevitable, but the hardware may be what is ultimately holding things back for now.
Niantic's attempts at visual AR haven't been nearly as interesting -- not sure if this is just knowing that the hardware wouldn't hold up, or not having the vision to implement it. They used to at least have the interest in immersive alternate reality gaming that tied in nicely, but that seems to be a long gone thing of the past.
So as much as I like the product, I find hard for Niantic to replicate the mainstream phenomena they had in 2016. I hope to be wrong, and they surprise with innovate like a AR wearable or a game with better mechanics. Sadly, I think those Layoffs are a reality check of the current state of their games.
(Maybe they made some amazing updates since then, and my points here are totally invalid…)
But what an extremely mismanaged product. Extremely buggy, extremely slow development, and extremely over-hyped AR features. Niantic was very slow in fixing any issues with the core game loop, and they basically never fixed issues with the later features, namely Battle League. I don’t even know where to start with the issues…opaque errors, location problems, low frame-rates, awful connectivity for Bluetooth accessories, buggy “Adventure Sync”, poor communications with users about issues or UI problems…
I played forever because of my perpetual love for Pokémon, and because it helped me connect with neighbors. Not that Niantic helped in any way at all there—community building was totally ad-hoc, via Facebook groups, or Facebook group chats, or Discord, or WhatsApp. But the entire time, I knew I was playing in a rickety house that was going to fall down at any moment. And it’s just not a surprise that house is starting to fall down.
(I just sort of drifted away, when my new dog demanded much more attention than my old fella. Turns out a year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever has a lot of energy, versus a 9-year-old Lab…)
I used to walk my local park daily for years, only ever saw a few people. Seemingly out of nowhere, the park seemed always packed...kids, adults, you name it. It was kind of jarring to me, to be honest.
I mentioned it in passing to my brother, kinda complaining about the sudden crowds but later describing it down to details...how people seemed to be taking pics of the ground for no reason...he said "they're playing pokemon go, dummy." I had no idea such a thing existed and thought I was going nuts.
But ultimately what I saw was a lot of people venturing out and about, enjoying the day, having fun solo or in groups... and thought it was a net positive to society, for once, unlike most modern apps and games.
Or…that’s how it used to be.
COVID neutered quite a lot of that. Though in retrospect it was a bit silly to be that scared of being outside…let’s not go there…
But more so, Niantic’s responses really killed in-person gameplay. You had Remote Raids, where you could be invited to join a raid at a gym from a friend. A good idea, but one they never really weaned the player base off of, because it was way easier for players to stay on the couch. (Well, and Niantic made fat bundles of cash off the Remote Raid Passes IAP.)
They also made totally sensible changes to interaction distances—which is to say, they doubled (was it doubled…whatever, a non-trivial increase) the distance you could be away from a Pokéstop or a Gym to interact with it. A really nice change, and one that I think made the game better even outside the pandemic. And they rolled it back, right when Omicron took hold. And they barely spoke a word about any of the changes. It felt fickle. Arbitrary.
I'm not familiar enough to say what they should have done, but whatever they were doing early on was clearly working better.
While it is theoretically fun to plop your Piplup on a table and feed it a Pinap: it’s slower than a Slowking to do so, and got very old very fast.
Some of the big flying Pokémon were also terrible to interact with. Nearly off-screen if they moved.
After we sunset it, it really struck me how scary GaaS can be. No one can play Minecraft in AR any more (at least currently) and I think that, even if it got old fast, it was a pretty magical experience. It made me really want to record a video playthrough for a few hours to try and capture the experience.
It got me out exploring my new neighborhood. I made casual friends which made me feel connected to the area. Got my dog lots and lots of walks, especially when the pandemic started. I have some truly fond memories of coming across rare Pokémon with said dog—who is now dead.
I had a great time. I was outside, in the world, walking and interacting, and it cost me some in-app purchase money. I spent, per month, significantly less than I would have going to one single movie. So don’t you dare to assume what is valuable or me to not.
I'm glad you and the dog enjoyed the results.
Also, with Ingress the most innovative area was also the one that players complained about the loudest - I am talking about actual player interactions. Going to someone else's portal and bombing it, creating blocker links, covering a strategic area with a huge field so as to win the cycle, etc. Unfortunately it got too competitive some players, so they started location spoofing, edit wars on portals and other behaviors that made the experience shitty for others.
Niantic's reaction was to gut that from their next games rather than try to improve. So I'm still waiting for a good location-based game where you can have some real location-based interactions with other players. Current offering is mostly "everybody going outside and playing a single-player game next to each other".
Ingress was an incredibly exciting technical innovation at the time. The idea of playing an area control game using your real world GPS coordinates was novel and the game encouraged genuine discovery in its initial phase by allowing you to record local points of interest: even in your hometown the game might lead you to walk down a road you were unfamiliar with and discover an interesting monument, fountain or building.
But they never really considered where to take it from there. Once the novelty wore off, it was mostly grind. Advanced players quickly developed strategies to optimize their play and "casuals" quickly fell behind with no way to catch up. The game remained fun for a small core group but effectively lacked an on-ramp for new players. Pokemon Go repeated this problem. They had created new exciting systems but not figured out how to make the game sustainably "fun" for most players.
I can only recommend watching the entire Failure Masterclass series from Introversion Software but at least the final video addressing their most anticipated game that never was, Subversion (a spiritual successor to Uplink). Without spoiling too much, the game was becoming increasingly complex and interesting but ultimately failed because there was no "game" there that would survive contact with players.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1giu6sMnAxY&list=PLbv7YX5V1c...
The game is you go outside and discover interesting places, then if you want, make friends with other players and organise stuff together
A group of determined players can keep a town permanently covered by a field, preventing everybody else from playing, especially if the anchor portals are in military bases or gated communities.
But that forum is a cesspool, both users and moderators are such assholes.
Maybe you need to play the game of being friendly with the people who permafield you and convincing them not to. Or being friendly with people who can stop them
Not really high level play, just high don't-care-about-anyone-else play
So are all the optimizations, really. There's enough surface area in the game they do provide some depth and give new people incentive to network with the pros. Whenever Niantic introduces a new Pokemon, mechanic or bonus there's something new to learn in terms of the meta-game.
I started playing in 2016 before the official release, but hasn't done so since some time in the pandemic - remote raids took out the fun out of it for me.
My guess is pokemon company intentionally butchers it and makes it distinct than (or lite version of) regular pokemon games.
Together Human Strong Separate Weak Failure
These are ticketed (monetized), location specific events for players.
It’s almost like it’s important to make business decisions off long term expectations, not short term miracles.
But then again, these are educated businesspeople who would know better than me…right? :P
The Angry Birds analogy is spot on. A game is just a fad, unless you manage to turn it into a franchise. The best financial model, if you have a successful fad, is "take the money and run." You just won the lottery, which tells us nothing about your innate ability to win lotteries.
And then send you a big bill.
I hope Naiantic's failure will not doom location based gaming. I suffered through the meaningless grind of Pokemon GO for longer than I expected because I loved the human and exploring elements so much. Niantic stumbled on a brilliant idea and completely failed to make an engaging game. It is hard for me to exaggerate how good I think locations based games are and how bad Niantic is at making games.
There are so many possibilities in this space. I encourage any game maker interested to continue developing it. Maybe something that tells a story or solve a puzzle rather than just collect crap.
If that data was easily available, I imagine you’d see a lot of great location apps. It’s not hard to imagine the normal Pokémon games in the location setting, where you actually move around instead of moving an avatar around and “fight” Pokémon in different areas to “win” them, or go to “gyms” and battle with friends and what not.
You’d probably need to design the stranger meeting stranger part around having that sort of thing only happen in secure locations like in the DND/Warhammer shop, and everything on non secure locations be based on friend systems, but still, it’s not hard to imagine a good location based Pokémon game. It’s just that niantic won’t make it.
Maybe open street map can supply the data, but you’re never going to have access to Google’s real world live monitoring of the movement of everyone with a smartphone.
Trying to build your startup on an IP you don’t own is a trap.
Fun in this space is hard. Go log into one of the crypto metaverses.
Niantic would do well to remember its roots.
It’s not a games studio, not really.
> I just wish somebody was still going to build an actual location-based Pokemon game.
Pokemon Go is absolutely a "location-based Pokemon game" today. The mechanics are simplified from the mainline console games, but it's definitely location-based Pokemon.
There was no need to simplify the battles, they were already as simple as it gets: select a Pokemon, select an attack, watch the result. Easy to learn, some tactical depth, works on mobile, accessible for all ages -> no need for changes. I'd say that the Pokemon Go battles were actually no simpler, they just lacked any depth and were less accessible.
Pokémon Go with a more aggressive turnaround time could have easily been Fortnite x10.
It could have been so much more. However I may not be in the target audience and some people did seem to enjoy the casual style - or play a lot despite that.
Also for some reason there were no poke stops or anything of note within many miles of my home. I live in a city of 60k people. But niantic originally populated their map based on the important locations in ingress, so if that game wasn't popular where you lived you basically got locked out of gameplay.
Pokemon Go, on the other hand...never really did. Sure, you've got the gyms, and biomes...the raids turned into this whole weird activity of piling into cars to drive from raid to raid...but generally, a raid in one place was as good as a raid in another. And dear god, while I thought Ingress had you staring at your phone a bit too much, at least if you were out doing those fielding trips, you had it in your pocket in between portals (which, depending on your area, could have been miles). Not generally so with Pokemon Go (though I'm sure rural players will disagree with me here).
This is the biggest fumble and what cemented the death of the game to me. Here’s what I think should have happened:
* Used the regular fighting system (turn based fighting)
* Allow players to have 6 on-hand Pokémon with the ability to preset teams.
* Any Pokémon caught after all 6 slots are filled are stored in the PC.
* Utilize the nostalgia of the old Gameboy/DS System and allow players that are within a certain distance to start a battle.
* Allow the creation of local tournaments (no exp gained )
* Hold regional based Tournaments where the winner is named the champion of that region and is qualified to participate in a National tournament.
* Hold a Worldwide tournament crowning a Pokémon World Champion. Participants must be winners of their nation’s tournament. (World Cup but for Pokémon)
* After a quantifiable amount of World Champions are made have prestigious “Pokémon Master” Tournament where the winner is crowned a Pokémon Master. Participants must be winners and runner ups of the World championship. Pull out all the stops to make this a hyped event on the same standing as League of Legends/Valorant E-sports tournaments since your already suing an IP greater than it.
* Add Dual Battle’s with a friend
* Hold Safari Zones/Events that allow rare specific Pokémon to be captured with increase of shinies (should have made these rare)
* For non PVP-players add in a Pokémon Snap like competition where participants can submit Photos of their Pokémon or wild Pokémon.
So much potential squandered.
Plus, the game itself is way too simple, and very much time-oriented, you have to be free at the right time to make the events..
I think Niantic type games would be better if they were closer to World of Warcraft in terms of game mechanics, more guild focused, more complex mechanics, etc.
It's probably held back a bit by the fact that they use real location data, and it's played by kids, and there are bad people who might do bad things with that if they aren't very careful, so they probably will always have to heavily limit some of the social features.
The bugginess is pretty extreme though. It's just Google maps plus a Nintendo DS era game, why is it so buggy, and why is it so intolerant of when you run out of high speed data?
Pokemon Go battles are just boring. PvP is a combination of reflexes and rock-paper-scissors. When WoW introduced pet battles it was a very obvious knockoff of Pokemon, but it was still actually pretty fun. PVE scenarios like the Celestial Tournament (their version of the Elite 4) could be really challenging and take a lot of planning, where you'd need to go out searching for the right combination of battle pets to win, or maybe just experiment with what you have to make it work. PvP was pretty balanced -- there were still combinations that were overpowered at times but in general what mattered more was the combinations of battle pets because of their diverse movements, where one might be for applying debuffs and another is for doing multi-attacks.
In Pokemon Go pvp is just "what's your counter pokemon to bastiodon / alteria / skarmory / azumarill / galarian skunfisk / etc" and then trying to fake out your opponent by baiting shields or being clever in how you swap pokemon. It's not the worst model but it bothers me how much more fun WoW Pet Battles are when Pokemon was the source material on how it should work.
They increased the interaction radius for Pokestops & Gyms. They actually reverted it (at the "end" of covid), faced a giant backlash, and un-reverted it (back to the increased radius). This is a rare occurrence of Niantic actually listening to the community.
They introduced remote raid passes. Remote raids are great in a pandemic since you can raid with friends from anywhere. I assume these generate a lot of income for Niantic since it's sold for 250 coins (now 300 coins) for 3 passes. What's baffling to me is how they are constantly discouraging users from doing remote raids.
When they shut it down and announced they started developing a game based on the pokemon IP that was pretty exciting, but the final product they released was frankly embarassing. I know the "I could build a this in a weekend" trope is ridiculous, but from my memory it felt that after over a year of developing (and shutting down a successful game for that amount of time!) they released what was basically a reskin of Ingress with less engrossing gameplay.
But the bafflement continued after that. Despite the bareness of the game it still had great success, except they failed to monetize it in any significant way, by the time they implemented half decent monetization their player base had already dropped by a factor hundred or something.
Of course given the ludicrous amount of initial hype that meant there was still an insane amount of players and they still made crazy revenue. And judging from the stories of players who remained active their development pace never really picked up.
I'd love to read war stories from those layed off. What happened inside that company that made it have such a seemingly weak game development pace despite being born from one of the worlds premier engineering firms. Was all of it spent on marketing and licensing the IP? Or spent on frivolous decoration like the fancy AR experience that mostly fizzled out?
All things considered the game was still a great success, just baffling when imagining the things that could have been. In my mind they could have been bigger than Nintendo itself.
They did switch the game to the same engine as Pokémon Go which frustrated some players because they preferred the aesthetics of the old UI.
Another thing is, that after experiencing Ingress, I kind of stopped believing in the "augmented reality" concept. The reality was augmented in one sense, but I noticed that when I focused on playing, I didnt notice some other things in the environment. My brain just didn't have enough capacity to perceive all the reality as it would normally do and also those augmented objects. It was more like a replacing.
Niantic’s (an Alphabet company) founder John Hanke (Google Earth, Google Maps, Street View…) achieved with Pokémon Go the most relevant production proof of concept that besides creating predictive products based on the “behavioural surplus” they could in fact, and globally, increase the effectiveness by simply herding people into bars, McDonald’s restaurants, shops and transforming the predictions into an actual increase of outcome. Users where instrumented into a predictable outcome.
With this Niantic in my opinion serves a greater and historical purpose: to demonstrate that this behaviourist approach to generate predictable results and monetise it was possible at a global scale.
It was surveillance capitalism at its prime.
https://lightship.dev/
Having said that, none of their recent game ideas sound promising to me, except perhaps Harry Potter. I think to do as well as Pokémon you need to come up with a concept that is interesting (or flavorful) enough for folks to weave into their daily routine.
Even Harry Potter might be a bad fit as IMO it has a really weak magic system (mechanically speaking). I suspect more successful would be a world with an interesting hard magic system with complex mechanics, plus compelling flavor like Harry Potter is so good at.
Personally I think Cultist Simulator would be a good fit, since it has compelling recipe-progression and has great flavor that could be woven into the real world.
Maybe Stranger Things, with the AR being a window into the Upside Down?
I wonder if there is a way to weave Eve Online into an AR experience where people could contribute resources to corporations & participate in territorial struggles.
Interested to hear other folks’ ideas for compelling AR experiences.
One mechanic I thought of for AR Cultist Simulator is to have a “be afraid to share” mechanic where you need to share with somebody in order to unlock recipes/solve challenges, but if you share widely you can be exploited. This could prevent folks from putting up FAQs revealing the solution to a given puzzle, and could provide a great tension and source of drama like Eve Online.
Anyway I think your idea for AR parlor games is a good one, that could be a very fruitful avenue. You could have a DM/host set up the clues within a house and let the rest play the game, or even have everyone scan the house and somehow randomly do the setup.
But it also felt they didn’t know what to do with Ingress. At some point the max level got hiked up to increase the grind and that was roughly when I stopped
Pokémon Go on the other hand felt much less complex and lost me personally as a player after a couple days