Niantic: Evolve the player experience

Key Takeaways

[Music] [Music] this is the type of thing that we fantasize about in sci-fi films not too long ago and now it's real it's part of our everyday lives and people love it hi my name is greg borwood and i am the vice president of games at niantic niantic is an ar company which is inspiring people to explore the world together [Music] i'm seeing from an engagement perspective is just the number of games out there there are i don't know google probably knows better than me thousands of games that launch the day so i mean there are so many new games a new new opportunities that are out there what is the discovery like how do people engage with new products the reality is once people find the game that they love they stick with it when we think about engaging with new players in our in our games we think about you know several different stages of how they might engage with us so the first most important thing is you know does this game you know kind of in the first couple days does it deliver on their expectations the second thing we think about kind of in the next phase is that that core gameplay loop is there something that allows them to engage in the way in the game you know several times a day the long term for us comes down to the social part of the game you know who are you engaging with what are those what are those core game play loops that turn into meta loops that that keep you coming back for a year or two years or four years or 10 years that's a tough thing to do we think that the social interactions are one way to do that i think back to my first go fest in chicago in 2018 and seeing the experiences on people's faces as they ran around this park collecting pokemon or participating in in battles that kind of shared experience was incredibly inspiring one of the things i'm incredibly excited about in the world right now of entertainment is really the world of immersive experiences whether it's you know immersive theater companies like punch drunk and what they've done with shows like sleep no more or whether it's the rise of escape rooms or whether it's the things that you know amusement parks are doing to really create these immersive worlds that you walk into and you become a part of it's a new form of entertainment that at least for me is incredibly incredibly exciting for me immersive experiences in that kind of environment is something that we think is at the core of augmented reality there's been a ton of changes in the last five years i mean one the platforms have evolved incredibly if you think about the evolution of mobile and smartphones and the technology we have not just in the rendering power of these devices which are getting incredible but you know the gps's that we have and now with the addition of 5g we can pretty much do anything within a mobile phone it's literally like having and carrying a platform with you wherever you go uh but also when you add an air layer of ar on top of it it completely changes the way not only you play games but the way you look at the world the multiplayer experiences are going to be the things that really define the next five to ten years in the coming years we're going to see some amazing strides being taken part of the industry to create really dynamic shared worlds and multiplayer experiences through our mobile devices that means you need to have really fast bandwidth you can have really quick pings to players especially players that are around you and be able to do that in a reliable way as processing power increases and network speed capabilities are expanded we're going to see an explosion of content harnessing the power of these technologies if we look five or ten years into the future i think the way we see the world is gonna be very different and uh i think it's gonna depend on how you want to see the world do you wanna live in that pokemon go world do you wanna live in that harry potter world do you want to live in a world that is a game board like there's so many different possibilities and that's where we're going to be really pushing the boundaries of what people want to experience those experiences that they want to have