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Poor Thing Never Made It Out Of Development
Developed in a partnership with James Frey, author of the Endgame Series, players join twelve teams and participate in the interactive story. Gameplay was supposed to include player-vs-player features.
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Niantic's Original Product
The application was a virtual tour guide that recommended nearby landmarks and other points of interest. Field Trip paved the way for the games that followed.
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Can Only Be Revived By Love's First Kiss
Ingress has been compared to geocaching and capture the flag. Players are called “agents” and have to choose to join one of two teams called “factions” to compete in regions called “cells” by drawing triangles called “fields” to influence the populations living under those fields called “mind units.”
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Died In Beta
The gameplay was like Pokemon Go, but you had to collect brick, lumber, grain, ore, and wool.
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Not Gonna Clear Up
On June 29, 2022 it was leaked to the press that Blue Sky was among four projects being killed by Niantic.
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Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio
A partnership between Niantic and immersive theater company Punchdrunk that promised to, “lead to new advances in tech-empowered audience experience that will redefine gaming, inspiring audiences for generations to come.”
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Melted
On June 29, 2022 it was leaked to the press that Snowball was among four projects being killed by Niantic.
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Right In The AllSpark
In a completely original concept, you use your cellphone to collect giant robots and have them battle other giant robots for control of points of interest in the real world.
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They're Always After Me Lucky Charms
In what could only be described as an absolutely groundbreaking partnership, General Mills and Niantic really outdid themselves with this one. Who would have thought that a breakfast cereal could be the key to unlocking the future of augmented reality gaming?
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Not eFfing Traded
A collaboration between Niantic and SpotX, Trading Post was an attempt to create collectable NFT biocards for Ingress agents that were stored on the Polygon blockchain.
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Snapped Out Of Existence By A CFO's Gauntlet
In an absolutely groundbreaking partnership, Niantic secured a deal with Disney to bring the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe to the AR gaming space. The marketing video showcased three kids who develop superpowers and begin fighting crime, implying a future where you too could be an Avenger, provided you were willing to stand in a Starbucks parking lot and mime throwing Thor’s hammer.
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An Air-Ball So Magnificent It Traveled Back In Time
Someone thought kids today needed to play one-on-one basketball in an AR simulation instead of on the court. Like a real NBA All-Star, you wandered your neighborhood, searching for sneakers and other gear drops, while playing mini-games against other players at real-world “drop zones” and sneaker shops. Requiring high-precision timing while standing on a busy sidewalk was, in retrospect, not the winning move.
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The Calculus Changes Dramatically
Xgress was a frontend for a database containing the scraped data of Ingress agents from 2016 until 2024. The tool had a limited free version and a premium version with access to the complete dataset, a helpful IITC plugin to access portal history, and a telegram bot that would provide realtime tracking information of your favorite agents. Although Niantic didn’t produce Xgress, Xgress relied on Niantic’s data.
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A Place Where You Can Be Conveniently Ignored
Remember yelling into the void on Google+, only to be met with the deafening silence of Niantic’s social media team? Well, fret no more! Those days of inefficient public outreach are over. Niantic offers a whole new level of delightful frustration: official community forums! That’s right, folks. Why settle for the vibrant discussions and helpful advice on platforms like Twitter or Reddit when you can experience the exquisite joy of being lectured by Niantic’s very own officially labeled XM Ambassadors?
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Your Volunteerism Has Been Noted And Discontinued
For years, Niantic’s most dedicated Ingress players volunteered their time, expertise, and community goodwill as XM Ambassadors and Vanguards—unpaid liaisons between the developer and the player base. In April 2024, Niantic thanked them for their service by eliminating both programs. A new “Player Ambassador” program was announced as a replacement. It is, by all accounts, different in name.
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The Hidden Gem That Stayed So Hidden Even The Developers Forgot Where They Put It
Niantic launched Truffel at SXSW 2023 and described it as “Niantic’s new app that brings a city’s hidden gems to life.” It’s as if they merely blew the dust off Field Trip, their earlier virtual tour guide application for recommending nearby landmarks and other points of interest, and gave it a fresh coat of paint. Because that’s what it was.
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We Sold The Playground To Buy The Land Underneath It
The independent gaming studio that gave the world Ingress, Pokémon GO, and a decade of audacious promises about the future of augmented reality sold its entire games business to Scopely for approximately $3.5 billion. The “Independent Niantic” is dead. Mind the robots on your way out.
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All Out Of Stock. Permanently.
Niantic’s official merchandise store, where fans could purchase physical goods branded with the logos of games Niantic would later kill. Following the Scopely acquisition in May 2025, the store was quietly shuttered. You can no longer buy an Ingress-branded tote bag. You can, however, still download the game it advertised, for now.
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Important Subtitle Goes Here
November 20, 2025 is when we found out that Niantic had acquired 8th Wall. Coincidentally, it was also the day that we found out what 8th Wall was, and that Niantic was killing it.
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All Promotional Apps Must Die
Maybe we’re giving Niantic too much credit because it was Warner Bros. Discovery who decided to pull the plug on this one. WB licensed Lightship from Niantic to build this dragon-themed virtual Tamagotchi game. You got a dragon egg, you hatched it, you spoke Valyrian to it, you cried when the app stopped working because you got attached to your dragon friend, etc.
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Limping Towards Death
Ingress has been compared to geocaching and capture the flag. Players are called “agents” and have to choose to join one of two teams called “factions” to compete in regions called “cells” by drawing triangles called “fields” to influence the populations living under those fields called “mind units.” Following the success of Pokémon Go, Niantic knew that the community wanted flashier graphics and CPU-intensive animations that would drain their batteries faster than ever before, and Ingress Prime was born.
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Stepping Towards Eternal Sleep
Niantic partnered with Nintendo to develop a game that’s not much more than a pedometer. A cute pedometer. A cute pedometer that has reportedly delayed the delivery of notifications like SMS messages since the beta.
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One Dot, Two Dots, Dead Dots, New Dots
Niantic’s first wholly-owned property since Ingress. You raise imaginary creatures from birth to adulthood and work with other players to diversify their species. The mobile game received generative AI enhancements in 2023 that made the pets more lifelike. Whether you wanted more lifelike pets or simply wanted to not crash on launch is a question that was never fully addressed.
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Invite Only
After locking down the markets for virtual pets and imaginary sky triangles, Niantic needed a new market to enter. Their executives had never heard of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Slack, or Telegram. So they decided to build on the success of the Comm feature in Ingress and created their own social network.
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Not A Bad Idea
Capcom announced its partnership with Niantic to create an AR version of Monster Hunter. While some may be skeptical of the collaboration, it’s worth noting that Niantic has plenty of experience in adapting Japanese video games that involve hunting monsters. They should be able to get 90% of the way there by applying this regular expression s/sneakers/weapons/ against the NBA All-World codebase. Can Niantic screw it up? We have faith they will. But, if we’re being fair, Monster Hunter is a good fit for Niantic.