Niantic officially launched this Friday Campfire, its social application which must group its games and its players in order to allow meetings and to attend events. Enough to put reality in its augmented reality games like Pokémon Go.
While all fans of Pokemon GO will be reunited this weekend in Berlin (Germany) for the Pokémon GO Fest, Niantic is taking the opportunity to do extensive social experimentation around its game.
The Californian firm has announced the worldwide launch of Campfire, a new application, but which is not a game for once. Or rather, which is an aggregation of its games. Because the goal is above all to put in contact its virtual players so that they meet in the real world.
Bring together virtual players in real life
Campfire has been tested for the past few months in beta with agents Ingressthe initial game based on augmented reality which later gave birth to Pokemon GO. It’s the turn of the latter’s players to integrate the app. This will allow them to find communities near them, wherever they are in the world, with the aim of allowing the creation of meetings and events between fans. And why not make them friends that can be found in the various Niantic titles.
The application is therefore intended to be a kind of social network between insiders, inspired by almost everything that exists (Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.). Campfire wantsfacilitate communication » between players and the discovery of communities, the organization of missions in the real world between players of Ingress or of Pokemon GOfor example. Everything will be centralized there, from the search for players to the exchange of private or group messages.
Four canceled projects and a crisis in sight
The global deployment of Campfire comes just after the announcement of a new project called NBA All-World, a new experience in augmented reality around basketball that will allow you to face today’s NBA players in their neighborhoods. For the moment, little information has been revealed by Niantic. We just know that the launch seems imminent.
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The most paradoxical thing is perhaps that these two announcements come when Bloomber ga revealed on Wednesday that four projects had been canceled internally and that Niantic was set to part ways with 85-90 members of its teams. The company would face a period of economic turbulence “by the admission of its CEO John Hanke in an internal email that the site has obtained. The game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite launched in 2019 was a flop, as were those based on pikmine(video game) and Catan (board game).
Among the projects that will therefore not see the light of day, we find Heavy Metal,Hamlet, Blue SkyandSnowball.
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