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GameLook report / At the end of last month, Niantic, the only major player on the AR mobile game track and the developer of “Pokémon Go”, announced that the company will undergo a major restructuring, including laying off 230 employees, closing its Los Angeles studio, and canceling two games based on the comic book. Granville and NBA IP games.
Among them, the game based on the Marvel IP has not yet been launched, but the NBA IP game “NBA All-World” has been launched at the beginning of this year. According to the data of Sensor Tower, the game’s first month turnover is about 1.6 million yuan, but the game has been released in the past 30 days. The income is less than 100,000 yuan.
Niantic CEO John Hanke said that right now Niantic’s “priority is to keep Pokémon Go healthy as a permanent game.” “We will also continue to invest in Pikmin Bloom, Peridot, Ingress and Monster Hunter Now. These are the games that most powerfully embody the core values of our location and local social community.”
According to official sources, “Monster Hunter Now” is expected to be a game that allows players to hunt monsters in the real world. Players will play the role of hunters and take risks in the real world with other players.The game is expected to be released globally in September 2023, and reservations have already begun
After this round of reorganization, Niantic and Capcom announced “Monster Hunter Now” in April this year, which will also be the only third-party authorized game of Niantic. You must know that after “Pokemon GO”, Niantic has been launching new AR games, and almost all of them are products supported by large IPs such as Harry Potter and Transformers.
However, compared to other genres of gameplay in the mobile game market, AR games can be said to be quite calm. Even if Apple officially pushes its own ARkit, many people may only think of “Pokemon GO” launched by Niantic in 2016 when mentioning AR with LBS function.
It can also be seen that Niantic’s series of big IP products did not cause any splashes.
In recent years, the fate of Niantic’s new games should be similar to this meme.
Because of this, after this round of Niantic reorganization, the author also has to think, can Niantic find its next “Pokemon GO”? AR game, which has been widely promoted since Niantic, and even once monopolized, but now it is half-dead track, will it return to the glory of yesterday?
Here is the game trailer for Monster Hunter Now:
After the project was cut, the only thing that is most likely to become Nian’s new cash cow is “Monster Hunter Now”. In the “Monster Hunter Now” promotional video, Niantic showed players how the dragon in “Monster Hunter” appeared in the real world through AR technology.
Ryozo Tsujimoto, producer of the “Monster Hunter” series, also said in the official press release, “”Monster Hunter Now” is an unprecedented “Monster Hunter” game, which attracts players to go out with cats and live in the real world. Encounter unbelievable monsters”.
Of course, like “Pokemon GO”, “Monster Hunter Now” also allows players to experience the game at home without leaving home.
According to the official introduction, there is a prop called “PaintBall” in the game. Players can use this prop to mark the various monsters they encounter outdoors, or bring the monsters back to their homes, and they can experience them at home with friends or alone. The process of hunting.
If you want to find out what makes “Monster Hunter Now” unique compared to Niantic’s past AR games, it may be that the “Monster Hunter” IP is more realistic in art, rather than Pokémon or Marvel. It tends to be cartoon or comic-style IP, so on the screen of the game, Niantic has one of the best graphics quality products.
“Fantasy creatures, compelling hunting and teamwork opportunities, and some of the best graphics on mobile, Monster Hunter Now is the perfect IP for AR gaming,” said Niantic founder John Hanke.
However, even if Niantic has made a breakthrough on the screen of “Monster Hunter Now”, for a game, when marketing and other aspects are not considered, the fun of the gameplay often determines the fate of the game. Can Niantic’s one-trick trick really be eaten all over the world?
Regardless of whether the gameplay of “Monster Hunter”, which has certain requirements for player operation, is suitable for players to play while walking on the road.
At least for now, judging from the commercial performance of Niantic’s past games and players’ evaluation of its new game, everything may not go well.
Under the game demo and promotional video of the already-cut “MARVEL World of Heroes”, it is not difficult to find criticism of Niantic’s “skinning” approach and player dissatisfaction.
“If this game came out five years ago, it would be really good, but now…”
“Looks like a crap version of Knighthood.”
“Niantic needs to realize that Pokemon GO is going to be their only hit.”
“Great, yet another game that Niantic will hardly ever support long term. Can’t wait for Niantic to ship 20 other products with similar weird synergy.”
It’s hard to say that similar criticisms won’t appear on “Monster Hunter Now”. After all, even Capcom himself actually has reservations about the evaluation of “Monster Hunter Now”. At the recent shareholder meeting, Capcom stated that it does not expect the game to make money for “Monster Hunter Now”, but to expand the influence of the Monster Hunter IP.
AR games, platforms, and virtual worlds spread in all directions
For readers familiar with Niantic, it may be better to understand why the company is still obsessed with the form of AR games even though it has almost failed to win for many years.
John Hanke, the founder of Niantic, was originally brought into the company by Google with the world’s first 3D global aerial map Keyhole (the predecessor of Google Earth) that supports online GPS.
After entering Google, John Hanke has also been focusing on the work of maps, leading the construction of Google Maps and Google Street View.
It can be said that as a company founded when John Hanke was still inside Google, the element of maps has long been engraved in Niantic’s genes.
In 2012, when the mobile game industry began to rise, a game experience and concept based on a real-world location was naturally novel. Therefore, “Ingress” has achieved global success even without the blessing of a big IP.
The commercial success of “Ingress”, including the location data accumulated by Niantic in the operation of the game, has also become the groundwork for the global explosion of “Pokemon GO” in 2016.
In 2018, the success of “Pokemon GO” also made Niantic more firm in the direction of AR. In addition to games, it also officially announced the prototype of its AR metaverse platform Lightship AR, “the Niantic Real World Platform (the Niantic Real World Platform)”.
And through the investment and acquisition of AR, computer vision and machine learning companies such as Matrix Mill and Escher Reality in the past few years, the “Niantic Real World Platform” already has AR cloud, anti-cheating and security before it is upgraded to Lightship AR. And so on for developers.
Back to the game, as GameLook once said, in the game industry, after a certain product is successful, some companies will continue to explore new possibilities such as gameplay and categories on this basis, such as Mihayou.
Some companies will continue to try to copy their own successful experience, trying to surpass their peers through continuous accumulation of experience, and become the top or even “monopolistic” game company in a certain category, such as Niantic.
But in theory, the game companies of the second model, when they launch explosive models, become a certain kind of Like in the category, such as “Paradise Like” in MMO, “COK-like” and “Shutu-like” in SLG Finally, although the follow-up products may experience fluctuations in business performance due to the burnout of the player experience, they often do not die easily.
However, after “Pokemon GO”, Niantic has hardly launched any products that can be compared with this game.
You know, what Niantic has obtained are the head IPs of companies such as Warner, Disney, and Nintendo, such as Harry Potter, Transformers, Pikmin, Marvel, and NBA, one of the world’s largest traditional sports events.
Of course, this is related to Niantic’s own operation of changing the soup in each generation of products. Whether there is room for deeper exploration and innovation in the AR advantages, GameLook can’t make a conclusion, but Niantic’s approach will not only make new games more interesting. Players are unattractive.
The commercial failure of one game product after another is also a deterrent and warning for developers who want to try LBS or AR.
Every developer trying to enter this field will inevitably think about how the performance of the game adapted from the head IP is like this, how should his original work survive.
Coincidentally, Niantic not long ago launched its first original IP AR game “Peridot” since its first game “Ingress” 10 years ago.
Similar to the classic “Sanjia” of the “Pokémon” series, at the beginning of “Peridot”, players need to choose one of the three eggs to hatch, and then through feeding, learning and most importantly, walking in the real world to complete Daily tasks to collect experience points and breed your own small animals.
And when their Peridot becomes an adult, players can also pay for in-game props to allow Peridot to reproduce.
With AR, Niantic also added the function of recognizing and interacting with the environment for the cute Peridot in the game, such as interacting with kittens and puppies.
At the beginning of its launch, “Peridot” entered the top 50 of the App Store’s free list in 24 countries and regions including the United States and Japan, but its performance in the best-selling list began to show weakness. According to the data from Sensor Tower, as of the end of June, the “Peridot” The game’s total in-app purchase revenue was just $1.4 million.
Unless “Peridot” turns against the wind, it is only a matter of time before the game becomes another “revenant” under the scythe of Niantic. Once “Peridot” is offline, this result will not only affect Niantic’s own development, but also affect whether the entire AR game will face wider doubts.
Changes lead to success, general rule lasts
As early as the end of June last year, Niantic had announced a round of layoffs. At that time, 80-90 people had been laid off, which was about 8% of the company’s total number of people (the total number of people in the company was about 1,000 people). It also announced the cancellation of 4 different games. project to further scale the company’s operations, “putting the company in the best possible position to weather any economic storm that may arise.”
Even if Niantic has “Pokemon GO” and a large number of AR-related patents in the company’s hands as a safety net, the company’s current situation will not be too bad anyway.
But Niantic still needs to seize the time to prove itself, and even prove the possibility of the entire AR game track. According to Sensor Tower data, many players were dissatisfied with Niantic’s decision to increase the price of the remote copy pass of “Pokémon Go” in March this year. Niantic’s monthly in-app purchase revenue has fallen from an average of $70 million between July 2022 and March 2023 to an average of $53 million over the past three months.
The aura of “Pokémon Go” is fading rapidly. Without IP support, how long Niantic can go on the AR game track is only a question mark. And this question mark will also hit the AR field that Niantic has been cultivating deeply.
In fact, if I think about it from the perspective of AR, I prefer to say that Niantic is a technology company rather than a game company, and games are just Niantic’s cash cow.
The most direct example is the Lightship AR platform and supporting development kit launched by Niantic in January 2021, and its cooperation with Qualcomm last year to participate in the design of the first AR headset.
In recent years, Niantic’s actions in the capital market have mainly been to acquire technology companies in the AR field, such as 8thWall in the direction of WebAR, rather than investing in or acquiring other game companies, even in 2021 when investment in the game industry is at its peak.
If its game business as a dairy cow cannot cope with the longer-term impact of the game industry, and eventually declines step by step, whether Niantic’s investment and accumulation in AR can support its complete transformation into a pure technology company remains to be discussed.
Although Apple, Meta, etc. have all bet on the potential of AR as a next-generation computing platform, the commercial development of this field is far less mature than the game industry and is still in its early stages.
How to innovate AR games, whether to explore other game categories in addition to AR games, etc., are all decisions that Niantic needs to make in order to survive.
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