[fenomas]

Considering that this is a game whose playing field is the entire planet, content generation has always been in the hands of the players. What surprises me most about Ingress is how little of the game scales that way though. Portals (the nodes players fight for control of) are submitted by players but approved manually, which typically takes 4-5 months. Likewise the game's major events ("anomalies") occur only in a few hand-chosen cities at a time, so most players have never been near one.

As for what Google gets out of it, originally Niantic's model was to build a business out of a sister app called Field Trip, which is a "show me something interesting near where I am" kind of app. Ingress was there to gamify the content generation, and presumably Field Trip would pay the bills somehow. There was also a tie-up angle, where some company (Jamba Juice?) had all its stores show up in-game as portals.

But Google acquired them before that process had gotten going, and hasn't done anything of note with Field Trip, so presumably that's not the answer. My suspicion is that they consider Ingress worthwhile just for the the data generated, and for convincing a lot of people to run around with location reporting turned on. You'd think that Google would also start doing something with the user-submitted data (e.g. surfacing the portals in Google Maps as "points of interest" or similar), but AFAIK that hasn't happened.

[shkkmo]

Google didn't acquire Niantic. Niantic was launched as a 'startup' within google.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3004551/can-startup-live-inside-g...

[fenomas]

Ah, thanks. That makes it all the stranger that Field Trip seems to be (or have become) an afterthought.

[pavel_lishin]

> some company (Jamba Juice?) had all its stores show up in-game as portals.

Duane Reade as well.

[mdellabitta]

And ZipCar.