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 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.