Should a sale of Niantic’s games eventually go through, I’m worried about the future of the Wayfarer community being uncertain. Niantic’s Wayfarer systems are what all of the nominations for Ingress/Pokemon Go/etc go through to be processed before being placed on the game boards.
Would nominations still work? Would the nomination criteria remain consistent? Will our userscripts for the IITC shared map get borked? What exactly are we dealing with in this potential future?
FYI, the Bloomberg article seems to be behind a paywall, so it may be easier to access it from Yahoo Finance for free:
Keep in mind this is coming from anonymous sources, and that there’s no assurance currently that the deal will go through. I can also see some people not being happy with a sale to a company that’s basically owned by Saudi Arabia, but I won’t get into all that here.
I don’t think it would happen as you have a lot of third parties (TPCi, Nintendo, CAPCOM and whoever else is doing a Niantic game we haven’t yet heard about) that would also have to agree to the sale.
It may be a way of spreading a false rumour just to see what the reaction is. I feel that on Reddit especially when there’s a decision on Pokémon GO that someone doesn’t like their solution is “well, Niantic should sell to someone who knows what they’re doing”.
Scopely do know what they’re doing (not saying Niantic doesn’t) when it comes to games, so if I was one of the aforementioned disgruntled Reddit users, I’d try to cook up some rumours too and see if anyone latched on to it
The sale was the gaming part of the business right?
So my initial reaction would be that the map side of things including wayfarer as we know it would be detached from the games completely? Since presumably Niantic would keep all the mapping stuff, and the games would be run by the new company
I suspect any sale would likely have a license agreement for the niantic spacial platform. Hopefully that would mean you would still be contributing to the database and the new game owners would sync to the database and users would see a seamless transition.
tbh a new owner doesnt have to take over their ideas. Personally, if i would buy this company, i wouldnt care that much about their ideas and things. The main IP would be the core. I dont pay 3,5 Bio for this or Ingress.
I have mixed views about the speculation surrounding the articles online. I know I would miss interacting with this community if parts of the wider business are sold off. (Assuming this community would disappear).
But, I would need to buy the Samsung Galaxy S900 with 900 Terrabytes of memory to scan a new location… just for the processing… I don’t think I could cope!
Yahoo just took the story from Bloomberg, most likely so it’s available for free, without a possible paywall. And PoGo Hub just took their info from the Bloomberg article.
Being that Bloomberg was the only major outlet that was reporting on this yesterday (from what I can tell), I think it best to take all of this with a grain of salt right now. All of the other news outlets picking this up today are basing their stories off of the Bloomberg article and nothing else. Most reporting on this today are news outlets in the tech/games space, like IGN and Polygon, as well. Sports Illustrated even has an article based on the Bloomberg one.
Like the previous person mentioned, these types of deals will usually come with a licence, the buying company will know that to update its maps it needs to have well spread resources, this is what makes wayfarer so good in my opinion, what better way to spread resources than to give them to the player community, it’s also a great way to reduce costs. And the players know the area they play in the best, they are experienced enough to make their own judgement and keep the maps up to date.
IF this is real, they will most likely use a licence for wayfarer or create a similar system.
I don’t think that they will remove communities like this, they could buy a licence or move it to another platform, but look at this from the perspective of the buying company. You would need to keep people working on place all across the world to keep the map up to date and make new wayspots.
Instead, why not use an already existing community that knows the areas they play in and is already spread very widely. It’s a good way to reduce costs, in my opinion. So I think it’s more than likely they would find a way to keep the wayfarer community or something similar active.
As it stands, everything is speculation and has no basis in fact until Niantic comes out with an official response. We don’t know if they will put the Gaming arm of the business on sale and whether they will license or permit the submission of Wayspots and AR scans as part of the agreement.
