Are you still checking? Then geolocation games are coming to you! Since the last year’s review, the number of worthy projects has almost doubled, there are leaders in the industry, but every month new, promising start-ups appear. For me, the topic of geo + social games has turned from a hobby into a mainstream work, so I want to share the freshest list of game geo-projects, briefly tell about the most noticeable and about where this blue ocean will develop further.

Companies

Booyah, which I unflatteringly spoke about a year ago, began to be corrected. Firing the CEO, they chose a strategy for copying hit mechanics from mobile games and adding geolocation chips. MyTown2 is a standard city builder with real buildings, No Zombies Allowed is a standard tower game with arcade missions on the map. Obviously, this is not how to discourage $ 30 million investment, but the guys at least started to make very high-quality and beautiful products.


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Red Robot chose a different strategy. In fact, having thrown out all the groundwork of the first game, Life is Crime, they relied on the technological platform for games, having made their own data parser and tile server for maps and standardized the API. Now they are taking to the satellites of young mobile developers and they are going to make a lot of innovative products with their hands. Time will tell how much this is a winning idea, while the first two games from young people - Rescue Rush and Global Outbreak - are more likely to be run by technology. A flagship Life is Magic while frankly stalled.


PerBlue last year released two clones of its advanced MMORPG Parallel Kingdom and publicly announced interesting figures, which I wrote on my blog following the trip to the GDC Online conference - $ 250k monthly revenue, 50,000 active audience. The clones expectedly did not take off, and the main project received a second wind with the launch of flights on ships over maps of real cities. The company's bid for the genre of "big" MMO.


Google took a step towards geo games, but it hurts a strange move. Some observers believe that Ingress is not a game, but a disguised collector of “paths” - the ways people go and drive, designed to improve the navigation graph of Google Maps. Since Google has its own map service and its base of places, it is easier for them to gamify this data. But whether Ingress becomes a mass game, or a lot of geeks - only time will tell.

Projects

I posted in public access my plate of geolocation games , where almost all the projects are collected. It is useful if you are going to dive deep into the topic and, like me, play all the games with maps and real places. For simply interested readers, below is a list of the most notable projects:

iOS

A gesture-driven mobile online game about capturing real cities. In the world there is a conflict of two parties, constantly supported by in-game events, tournaments and epic tasks. Very visually stylish project, the first of all geolocation games to make a beautiful three-dimensional map (based on OpenStreetMap, by the way). The project, unfortunately, is dying, and so far it is unknown for the developers to release it. Keep silent.

iOS / Android

The patriarch of geolocation games that turn our world into one big MMORPG feels good. More recently, flying ships have appeared in the game, opening up a new perspective of gameplay with a map of the world. Over the past years, players have built many cities, between which there is now an economic war. What is remarkable, there is oil in Moscow :)

iOS / Android

The young contender for the role of the most real of MMORPG. Quests are now taken on the streets of these cities, and instances become South Butovo and Harlem. Fanfare while you can remove the naked eye visible technical problems and lack of content, but the concept is very interesting.

iOS

"Thanks for the food. Send more. Always yours, zombies. ”- you received a medal for the first refusal to accept a refugee from the outside world, who survived the virus and the zombie invasion. Being a classic “tower game”, it has excellent graphics and action elements, when you need to be as good as Mila Jovovich to shoot zombies around the crowd on the real world map, taking valuable cargo in the back of the car.

Android

On the one hand, this is a geolocation game with a tight binding to your coordinates, which, as repeatedly verified, is epic fail. On the other hand, this is Google, which easily gathered more than a million people to the first closed testing. While there is a high-quality shell and cool PR, but there is no deep and interesting game. We will follow into what Ingress will turn to release.

iOS

Revived zombie comics. Yes, again - a year ago, half of the geolocation games were about mafia and street gangs, now the trend of zombies has arrived. A simple one-click action that takes place in locations and buildings taken from Foursquare. Funny and lovingly painted art and the setting. Great game for five minutes a day.

Trends

Nothing has changed since the past year with the deplorable monetization. As before, the developers did not learn how to earn money on unique geolocation and social games chips, nor even simple and already well-known mechanics could not transfer them normally. Justin from PerBlue, with pride in his voice, said that 37% of their revenues are eternal microavatars. That for normal free2play - full / facepalm and / epicfail.

Still, the main market developers choose the United States, and the platform - iOS. The alternatives so far are not plowed field, Europe is interested in the fact that the Finns are from the Gray Area (Shadow Cities game), and a decent browser project is generally one (Fleck). In Asia, there is both an audience and money, but so far there are very few projects in general, neither developed there, nor well localized and running. The main success is with Life is Crime with their USA vs Hong Kong competition.

With a slight bias in zombies, but geolocation games are diversified by setting, the mafia clones are gradually losing ground. There were also "big" fantasy worlds, and sci-fi, and kazualschina with big heads, and a military theme. Geography is also expanding, and it is more than encouraging that domestic developers are joining the trend. The first signs - the Bigshot and Geopo.ly projects have not survived to our days, but they were replaced by DigitWar and the City of Heroes. And the upcoming CashSquare long before the release was already estimated at $ 4.5 million.

Geolocation is rapidly capturing the advertising and offer / coupon market, including in offline retail. From our depths it is not noticeable, but in San Francisco in the shopping center I personally saw not one or two people with a smartphone and running Shopkick. It is not yet clear how the games will flow into this stream, but what exactly will flow in is because the advertising wave carries billions of dollars.

Summarizing: for now games + geolocation = new market . It is already measured in millions of dollars, but is still microscopic on a common scale and is ideal for blitzkrieg. I share the list of pioneering games with you, use it. It's not too late to go surfing this ocean. And we have already started :)