Well, moving to TV certainly seems like one of the options available for Google right now to make more money off the hit AR (augmented reality) game Ingress. The game was created by the mothership’s gaming studio, Niantic Labs, and has been one of the real hits that brought AR gaming into the public spotlight. The question is, how do you package the game for TV?
There’s no answer yet to that question, but we should be getting some hints as to how Google wants to present Ingress in TV format soon. Ingress has been one of the more popular augmented reality games to date, figuring at around 5 million downloads from the Google Play Store alone (for Android devices). The game was launched over the Android platform and gained heavy following that an iOS app was launched a year later.
The game itself is based on a traditional approach to AR – people who play the game have to go to real-world locations and “capture” it for their in-game group to gain bonuses and get game items and power-ups. The game is heavy on social elements, and players tend to do actual real-world meet-ups to play the game in a group.
As Google is thinking of how to make more visibility and income from Ingress, Niantic Labs is already at work on a follow-up game which uses more or less the same AR principles, but is heavy on the mythos and plotline. The new game is called Endgame: Proving Grounds.
VIA: CNET
Started as an iOS app? In what universe?
Original source says the iOS version was *released* later, but was originally out on Android, as you’d expect. What sort of shoddy interpretation is this, on a site labelled “android community”?!
Ingress was out on android for at least 1 year before hitting ios.
Article updated. Thanks.