[cheschire]

A level 40 player (deeply committed to get that high) creates a stop with a photo of a statue in his back yard fountain so he could cheat. You could wait until multiple people submit it, or just allow it and just see how many people visit it. Either way, you get validation data on it.

Conversely, a player creates a stop for a new statue that was just placed outside of a government building in the last few weeks. This stop gets visited hundreds or thousands of times a day. You've now identified a hub. This hub can be used to validate the existence of other items of interest in the near vicinity.

[nirui]

It makes more sense now, but I still got questions.

You see, when you created an in-game location, you're inviting players to go there, regardless whether or not the location is popular in the real life. Dedicated players may take a detour from their normal day-to-day route just to hit that location to gain in-game advantages, which will generate data noise if the map software wants to use players data to improve their product for normal non-player users.

Also, let's don't forget products like Google Maps and Bing Maps are already collecting users locations. And in addition to the location, it also knows where the user was, where the user wants to go and how the user would go there (Take bus, drive, walk etc). That, is high quality data (Better than a Niantic game could provide) that generates profit directly.

All the reasons combine, I think I still have some doubts about that business model.

[PeterisP]

A couple points here.

First, you get data about how pedestrians can reach all the truly popular locations. If you also get extra data about how pedestrians can reach various irrelevant locations, okay, that doesn't have value but that's not harmful; what matters is that all kinds of niche landmarks that would be interesting to tourists are somewhere in your data.

Second, people making a detour from their normal day-to-day route to reach some location is the whole point - these are local people with knowledge of how their city works; you don't want to measure how tourists usually get from landmark A to landmark B; you'd want to see what shortcuts an optimizing local would take when getting from landmark A to landmark B - which is different than simply looking at random people walking habits with no intent to optimize the route; the gamification provides an incentive to optimize routes and allows you to harvest the knowledge of that optimization.

If someone tells google maps that they want to go from A to B, and google maps tracks how they got there, then it doesn't harvest any information about the best route because the user doesn't know it, they wanted a recommendation and likely tried to follow it even if it's very suboptimal, so you'll just get a reprocessed version of the data you already had (and gave to that user). On the other hand the data from Niantic is useful so that Google maps can make a better recommendation.

Third issue is that the Niantic process also allows you to detect undesirable routes. If Google maps directs a tourist from A to B through a shortcut that's passable but unpleasant in some manner, then they'll take that route; and if they send another one there, they'll also go there, because they don't know better and the alternatives are (probably) not obvious. You'll only get a signal of people not going there if it's really bad e.g. impassable.

Niantic, however, can detect that most people who want to go from A to B (because of game incentives) but who know all the routes from A to B (instead of asking for directions like the google maps usecase) are intentionally taking a longer route for whatever reason - which is again useful data for improving Google Maps recommendations.